Using fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm for common lecturer timetabling among departments

Abstract

University course timetabling problem is one of the hard problems and it must be done for each term frequently which is an exhausting and time consuming task. The main technique in the presented approach is focused on developing and making the process of timetabling common lecturers among different departments of a university scalable. The aim of this paper is to improve the satisfaction of common lecturers among departments and then minimize the loss of resources within departments. The applied method is to use a collaborative search approach. In this method, at first all departments perform their scheduling process locally; then two clustering and traversing agents are used where the former is to cluster common lecturers among departments and the latter is to find unused resources among departments. After performing the clustering and traversing processes, the mapping operation in done based on principles of common lecturers constraint in redundant resources in order to gain the objectives of the problem. The problem's evaluation metric is evaluated via using fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm on common lecturer constraints within a multi agent system. An applied dataset is based on meeting the requirements of scheduling in real world among various departments of Islamic Azad University, Ahar Branch and the success of results would be in respect of satisfying uniform distribution and allocation of common lecturers on redundant resources among different departments .