Using agents to create a university timetable addressing essential & desirable constraints and fair allocation of resources

Wangmaeteekul, Pennee; Budgen, David

Abstract

University timetabling resource allocation problems have previously been investigated using multi-agent systems. Although these studies have proposed various models, these have not addressed such issues as fairness of allocation, and of ranking constraints upon acceptable solutions by using an ordinal scale. This research aims to investigate how to allocate teaching resources so as to satisfy the essential constraints for serving the teaching activities in a fair manner, while recognizing the preferences of the staff and students as well. The proposed agent model uses Year-Programme Agents and a Rooms Agent performing different roles for organizing university's distributed timetables. The fairness issue has been addressed by applying a round robin algorithm to structure the initial allocation phase. The initial results of our agent-based system are able to satisfy all of the essential constraints and meet most of the desirable constraints when assessed against the needs of the representative scenarios which have been defined by the International Timetabling Competition (ITC-2007). A combination of Round-Robin allocation and interleaved negotiations gives the best average values of resource quality among YPAs. The next stage of this research will be to add more capabilities to both agents and system so as to address a mix of desirable constraints that is more consistent with real world needs. © 2011 IADIS.

Citation

Wangmaeteekul, P., & Budgen, D. (2011, February). Using agents to create a university timetable addressing essential & desirable constraints and fair allocation of resources. Presented at Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference Intelligent Systems and Agents 2011, Part of the IADIS Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems 2011, MCCSIS 2011, Avila, Spain

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference Intelligent Systems and Agents 2011, Part of the IADIS Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems 2011, MCCSIS 2011
• Start Date: Feb 1, 2011
• Publication Date: Dec 1, 2011
• Deposit Date: Feb 23, 2025
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 137-142
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/3500704