Multi-agent system for teaching service distribution with coalition formation

Abstract

In University Management, one of the recurring problems that each department has to solve, each year, is the Teaching Service Distribution (TSD) or Teaching Assignment Problem (TAP). The problem of TSD consist to assign teachers to courses classes - lectures, tutorials, practical or laboratory - taking into account these preferences and qualifications for teaching. This is a crucial stage, since it is almost imperative that the TSD is fully defined before the process of schedules generating. However, most institutions of higher education, don't have a specific software tool to support the process of TSD. In this paper we propose a new approach for solving the TSD consisting on the formulation of the problem as a distributed scheduling problem with the formation with coalitions formation. The problem is solved in the context of a multi-agent system where the real agents are modeled by computational agents, with their interests, but may cooperate in alliance groups. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.