The Neighbourhood Community Projects (NCP) votes had been cast across a small Canadian city in June 2019, and Jean Matthews was about to receive a tabulation of the results. How should she identify which community projects to pursue? Would neighbourhood residents be satisfied with the results?

NEIGHBOURHOOD COMMUNITY PROJECTS

Matthews was a recent university graduate who now worked at city hall. Throughout her undergraduate degree, she had gravitated toward quantitative classes, like statistics and analytics, and was keen to put her skills in action. Her manager, Kristen Newton, had the perfect project for her, and she quickly assigned Matthews to the NCP Committee. The third annual NCP event was an opportunity for residents of the city to have their say in how a dedicated portion of the city's budget should be spent in their community. Residents were invited to submit ideas to city staff, who would then work with the residents to ensure ideas were feasible in terms of cost, ease of implementation, and impact on existing city plans or projects. Residents could request funding for things such as playground equipment upgrades, block parties, commemorative street signs, pollinator gardens, bike racks, and more. Ideas had to fall into one or two of the four main categories: culture, environment, park, and roads. Once ideas were vetted by city staff, residents promoted them through door-to-door campaigns, social media, and posters. On a Saturday in early June, members of the community were welcomed to vote for up to three ideas for their neighbourhood. Community centres hosted stations where physical ballots could be cast, and online voting allowed citizens to participate remotely. The event drew a great deal of support from the community, but the event also required a great deal of administrative resources before successful projects could be implemented. In addition to working with residents to refine their proposals, 23 polling stations had to be staffed across the oity, and physical and virtual votes had to be tallied. Once the total votes were compiled, the NCP Committee had to consider both the popularity of the idea among the community as well as its cost, and then decide which ideas to pursue based on these considerations. city set aside CA$300,000' to be split evenly across four neighbourhoods: Uptown, East, Downtown, and West. Each neighbourhood was allotted a maximum of $75,000 that could be used toward any number of projects, and the proposed cost for a single project could not exceed $50,000. This $50,000 limit was a new restriction introduced in 2019; in previous years, a single project could request the full $75,000 budgeted for the neighbourhood. PROPOSED IDEAS AND PAST WINNERS Throughout the campaign period, Matthews familiarized herself with the idea proposals (see Exhibit 1). She noticed that different ideas were sometimes proposed for the same location; for example, one citizen suggested building a playground, while another proposed installing Frisbee golf nets at the same neighbourhood park. Matthews also saw similar ideas proposed for a single neighbourhood; for example, three murals at different addresses were pitched for Downtown. Some ideas seemed to complement one another due to their seasonality, such as an outdoor ice rink and a bouldering structure. Matthews decided to dig even deeper and so examined the winning projects from 2018 and 2017 (see Exhibits 2 and 3). She wondered if certain ideas were sure winners (or losers) and if the city would ever impose restrictions on the number of project types it would fund. Matthews decided to stop by Newton's office. "Hi Kristen. Do you have a minute to go over the NCP proposals?" Matthews asked her manager. "Sure Jean," Newton replied. "What's on your mind?" Matthews explained, "I was looking over the past NCP winners, and a lot of them were for park improvements, but hardly any were related to roads or bike paths. Is that typical?" "We're only in our third year," Newton said, "so it's hard to say what's typical. It all depends on the ideas that are submitted and vetted by our committee and on how the community votes." "So, technically, a neighbourhood could keep getting more and more playgrounds each year?" Matthews asked. "Well, revisions to the NCP guidelines aren't out of the question. Last year, city council debated whether it was fair for the same address to receive funding in two consecutive years, but no formal change to the guidelines materialized," Newton explained. "I do know that a thorough review of the NCP program is happening in September." VOTING RESULTS AVAILABLE On the Monday after voting day, Matthews arrived at work and opened the file with the voting results. Given the increasing popularity of the NCP event, Newton advised Matthews to come up with a way to allocate funds systematically that avoided cross-referencing ideas and that balanced costs. Newton hoped this event would continue for many years, but she was aware that the current NCP guidelines were subject to revisions. She stressed to Matthews the importance of a method that could be applied again in the future and that could be easily adapted in the case that funding levels, thresholds on types of projects or other changes were imposed by the city.

Your tasks are to help Mathews and the Neighbourhood Community Projects (NCP) committee in the case to

(1) Identify the value measures (or objectives) that could be considered when deciding on funding for neighbourhood improvement projects.

(2) Help Mathews to develop a process to determine which neighbourhood improvement ideas should be funded.

(3) Help Mathews to ensure that her proposed process is fair to city residents. You are required to apply both dynamic programming and integer programming techniques learned in this course unit to build different decision models and develop their solution processes. Any assumptions you make should be reasonable with justification found in the case. Depending on the assumptions you have made, your models and solutions could be different.

You should discuss the advantages and limitations of the different models you have built. You can start from a technique your group feel most comfortable to apply. (1) Identify the decision making problem. (2) Formulate optimisation models for the problem. (3) Solve the problem (you can use Excel, Excel Solver or programming codes such as Python if you feel appropriate). (4) Use your models to make recommendations. Once you get one model working, you may wish to try different scenarios, you can use one of the models you have developed to explore the effects of different assumptions. You will be assigned to a group of 6-7 members.

Your deliverables are as follows. 1) You will be required to create word doc of your model, solution process, results, and recommendations to Mathews and the Neighbourhood Community Projects Committee. Every member must present. There should be a cover slide and an outline slide. In those two slides, you should indicate which group member presents which slides. Every member should understand every part of the work produced, not just the part they present.