Vol.8, No.1, February 2019.                                                                                                                                                                             ISSN: 2217-8309

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        eISSN: 2217-8333

TEM Journal

TECHNOLOGY, EDUCATION, MANAGEMENT, INFORMATICS

Association for Information Communication Technology Education and Science

A Multi-Agent System for Course Timetable Generation

Zina Houhamdi, Belkacem Athamena, Rani Abuzaineddin, Mohammad Muhairat

© 2019 Belkacem Athamena, published by UIKTEN. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Citation Information: TEM Journal. Volume 8, Issue 1, Pages 211-221, ISSN 2217-8309, DOI: 10.18421/TEM81-30, February 2019.

Received: 22 January 2019.
Accepted: 21 February 2019.
Published: 27 February 2019.

Abstract:

In the university, course scheduling and preparation for each semester can be defined as the process of determining what courses to offer, the number of sections needed for each course, assigning of a faculty member to teach each section, and allocating a timeslot and a classroom for each section to avoid clashes. The output of this activity (which is a timetable) affects every faculty member and student in various departments. This process is essentially broken down into three main stages: determining the courses to be offered as well as their section numbers, assigning faculty members to different sections, and scheduling of the sections into timeslots and classrooms.
This paper investigates each of these steps and congregates them in a scheduling and Decision Support System (DSS). The DSS is used to make easy the process of course offerings by taking into consideration the students’ suggestions because the department resources are limited. The faculty member preferences are also considered in the assignment of sections for the sake of lessening disappointments in the department. Also, the couples (faculty, section) are planned into university timeslots based on faculty member preferences. Our proposed system considers student suggestions and preferences and the time availability of a faculty member since it minimizes disappointments and avoids conflicts between faculty members and classrooms and courses.

Keywords – Multi-agents, Scheduling problem, Course timetable.

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