Project Title: Managing the Office Space Allocation Problem – A Demonstration Framework Student: Alexandra Patrascu Course: MSc Management of Information Technology Abstract: Office Space Allocation Problem (OSA) is concerned with the assignment of a set of office spaces to entities, such as people, within an organization. The aim of the problem is in general to allocate the limited available space so that the misuse is minimized and the satisfaction of the constraints is maximized. The OSA problem is faced by many organizations, both academic institutions and businesses, where thousands of entities need to be distributed over thousands of office spaces located in possibly more buildings. Due to the complexity of the real-world scenarios (given by the problem size and number of constraints), an automated allocation system is preferred over a human expert, in order to better tackle the problem and produce higher quality solutions. So far the research done on this topic consists of scientific papers which propose several algorithms for solving the OSA problem and describe the approach in a technical way, not very easily reached by the wider public. Therefore, the main issue identified and addressed in this project is the lack of materials which explain the OSA problem in a more accessible manner, not only for people with scientific background, but for possible managers and business people. Thus, a demonstrator for the problem might solve this issue by making use of computational technologies to create a connection between the research and the industry, allowing other people (except of researchers) to make use of the concepts behind the OSA problem. In this context, the main goal of this project is to build an application which conceptualizes the Office Space Allocation problem and describes how it can be approached in a systematic manner, by using one of the existing algorithms. To achieve this goal, a demonstrator web application was created, which provides to the user a visual representation of the OSA problem. In the development of the software system, several principles of graphical user interface design were followed in order to produce an appropriate presentation format of the problem. The final result of the project is the web application built as a demonstrator framework for OSA, which also includes an experimental solver, so that the user can try and solve several different problems and see the feasible allocations provided by the algorithm. Having a solver as well, through which the user can interact with the system represents an additional mechanism meant to help in the understanding of the problem. This dissertation includes the documentation produced during the development of the software system, from the initial phases of analysis to design and implementation. Also a special section is dedicated to the testing mechanisms applied to the project, together with a general evaluation of the application. The results gathered from testing showed that the application does not present significant errors and it satisfies almost all the requirements, with one exception representing the algorithm implementation of solving OSA problems.