A Generalized National Planning Approach for Admission Capacity in Higher Education: A Nonlinear Integer Goal Programming Model with a Novel Differential Evolution Algorithm

Abstract

This paper proposes a nonlinear integer goal programming model (NIGPM) for solving the general problem of admission capacity planning in a country as a whole. The work aims to satisfy most of the required key objectives of a country related to the enrollment problem for higher education. The system general outlines are developed along with the solution methodology for application to the time horizon in a given plan. The up-to-date data for Saudi Arabia is used as a case study and a novel evolutionary algorithm based on modified differential evolution (DE) algorithm is used to solve the complexity of the NIGPM generated for different goal priorities. The experimental results presented in this paper show their effectiveness in solving the admission capacity for higher education in terms of final solution quality and robustness.