An Effective
An
Effective and Efficient Class-Course-Faculty Timetabling
Assignment for an
Educational Institute
Sung-Tsun Shih1,
Chian-Yi Chao 2, Chin-Ming Hsu 3
1Department of Electronic Engineering, Cheng Shiu University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
2Department of Electronic Engineering, Kao Yuan University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
3Department of Information Technology, Kao Yuan University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Abstract: This
paper proposes a class-course-faculty timetabling assigning model for an
educational institute to increase the overall departmental performance,
including enhancing teaching quality, making good use of student time, saving
college budgets, and sharing departmental resources effectively. To achieve
these goals, both faculty and classes are classified into different groups
based on teachers’ specialties and courses’ attributes; the classified data and
allocating rules are processed by a heuristic driven process and two fitness
functions. The proposed heuristic driven process coupled with two fitness
functions is mainly used to satisfy students’ needs for taking or retaking
certain courses without delaying their graduation where the class sizes are
balanced and merged to decrease the number of elective courses opened to the
students. Allocating rules applied in the classrooms and laboratories
management are based on the attributes of the courses and the availabilities of
the resources to ensure that the resources can be shared effectively. The
proposed timetabling assigning model has been simulated in C programming codes
and MS SQL server is used as backend database. It allows teachers to get on the
Website to key in at least 7 different courses of their preferring teaching
courses, where the keyed in courses should be either in the same attributes of
the specific course group or in the general course group. From the experimental
results, there are about 90% of 100 courses assigned to the specific professional
teacher. The minimum and maximum average satisfaction for all students’ needs
is 0.8 and 0.9, respectively, where the lowest index value is 0.7 and the
highest index value is 1. These results show that the difference of each
student’s satisfaction is small; and the teachers’ and students’ expectations
on teaching specific subjects and taking specific courses can be satisfied as
nearly as possible.
[Sung-Tsun Shih, Chian-Yi Chao, Chin-Ming Hsu. An Effective and Efficient Class-Course-Faculty
Timetabling Assignment for an Educational
Institute. Life Sci J 2012;9(1):47-55] (ISSN:1097-8135). http://www.lifesciencesite.com. 9
Keywords: Class-course-faculty timetabling, heuristic
driven and fitness function. Full Text 9
