AI matches children to daycare centers

Fujitsu Ltd, Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd and the Fujitsu Social Mathematics Division of the Institute of Mathematics for Industry at Kyushu University have developed an AI-based matching technology that uses game theory to automatically calculate an optimal matching of children to daycare centers.

Using this technology, a complicated daycare admissions screening that had previously required several days by hand took only seconds.The admissions process of matching children to daycare centers seeks to fulfill as many of the applicants' preferences as possible based on complex requirements, including applicant priority criteria set by each local government and requests for siblings to be admitted to the same daycare center. This has made it difficult to automate the matching process in a way that would satisfy all applicants.

As a result, many local governments have, until now, manually conducted trial and error to as much as possible accommodate preferences for siblings to attend the same daycare center, but this meant that seat assignment by the local government could take several weeks, requiring some time before the applicants could be notified of the results. There were also issues such as siblings being admitted to different daycare centers due to applicant preferences not being accepted.

Now, this newly developed technology has made it possible to match children to daycare centers, meeting as many preferences as possible, following a priority ranking. This is done by modeling the dependency relationships of complex requirements, including parents who prioritize siblings going to the same daycare center, or parents who do not mind if their children go to different daycare centers as long as both children get a seat, using a mathematical model based on game theory, which rationally resolves the relationships between people having differing values. When this technology was evaluated using anonymized data from about 8,000 children in the city of Saitama, it successfully calculated an optimal assignment result in just a few seconds.F

Fujitsu said it plans to offer this technology as an optional service for MICJET MISALIO Child-Rearing Support, a childcare support system for local governments, during fiscal 2017. The company will also work to apply this technology to a variety of matching problems as part of Fujitsu Human Centric AI Zinrai, Fujitsu's approach to artificial intelligence.

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