Solving Student-Project Research Assignment Problems Using A Novel Greedy Linear Heuristic Algorithm: A Case Study At King Saud University, Riyadh Saudi Arabia
, Maashi, M. . 2020
There is a growing need to automatically assign project to students due to the increasing number of students. Allocating groups of students to several projects based on predetermined criteria is not a trivial task at most educational institutions. The group of students must enter the score of their project preferences, in the matrix of the project-students matrix. The problem of project-students allocation is becoming more complex and harder when the number of projects and groups becomes bigger. The Graduation Project Committee (GPC) at the Software Engineering Department in King Saud University (SWE-KSU) faces this problem each semester. However, the project allocation process is done at KSU manually. This process is time and effort consuming, especially when dealing with big number of groups. To solve this problem, an automated group-project allocation solver a greedy linear heuristic algorithm namely (GLHA) is proposed. The proposed algorithm finding a student-project optimal stable matching in a sequential liner manner by evaluating project preferences of each group in order to satisfying all the hard constraints (capacity) and the soft constraints (groups’ preferences) as much as possible based on the GPA criteria.. As graduation projects for bachelor’s degree at KSU-SWE as used a case study. The proposed algorithm GLHA is applied in different KSU-SWE Spring/Fall 2018 real-datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that GLHA has a capability to finds a stable matching of groups to projects when applied to solve the project-group allocation problem at KSU-SWE. GLHA is able efficiently produce a good quality solution in a reasonable period of time. The proposed algorithm is specifically designed to meet the GPC requirements at SWE department. A further work needs to increase the generality of the algorithm to address different type of the project-group allocation problem is further.
