Interactive planning of competency-driven university teaching staff allocation

Abstract

This paper focuses on a teacher allocation problem that is specifically concerned with assigning available academic lecturers to remaining courses from a given student curriculum. The teachers are linked to tasks according to competencies, competence requirements enforced by the curriculum as well as the number and type of disruptions that hamper the fulfilment of courses. The problem under consideration boils down to searching links between competencies possessed by teachers and competencies required by the curricula that will, firstly, balance student needs and teacher workload and, secondly, ensure an assumed robustness level of the teaching schedule. The implemented interactive method performs iterative solving of analysis and synthesis problems concerned with alternative evaluation/robustness of the competency framework. Its performance is evaluated against a set of real historical data and arbitrarily selected sets of disruptions. The computational results indicate that our method yields better solutions compared to the manual allocation by the university.