A Heuristic Algorithm for Student-Project Allocation Problem

Abstract

The Student-Project Allocation problem with lecturer preferences over Students with Ties (SPA-ST) is to find a stable matching of students and projects to satisfy the constraints on student preferences over projects, lecturer preferences over students, and the maximum number of students given by each project and lecturer. This problem has attracted many researchers because of its wide applications in allocating students to projects at many universities worldwide. However, the main weakness of existing algorithms is their high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a heuristic algorithm to improve solution quality and execution time for solving the SPA-ST problem of large sizes. Experimental results on randomly generated datasets show that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm regarding solution quality and execution time.