Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
12th International Statistics Days Conference, 13 -16 October 2022, İzmir, Türkiye, 13 - 16 Ekim 2022, ss.4
The educational content of the undergraduate departments in all of the universities all over
the world is mainly based on the knowledge, skills, and capabilities that the graduates will
require in their business life. Many graduates will use these skills or capabilities, which are
usually gained from the compulsory and elective courses in the universities to meet the
requirements and specifications in their business life. Therefore, the university course
timetabling which is NP-hard and a class of scheduling problems is of great importance to
training well-equipped individuals in both business and daily life. However, none of the
available studies in the literature have considered the optimal distribution of the
capabilities/skills over the curriculum that are essentially gained from compulsory and
opened elective courses. Based on this motivation, this research first introduces a novel
capability-based course timetabling approach, which provides a wide variety of courses with
a maximal capability set to the students during their university education. To do this, several
learning outcomes and course contents are first clustered to obtain basic capabilities that the
students should acquire. Then, a mixed-integer non-linear programming model with both
hard and soft constraints is developed to provide appropriate distribution of these capabilities
over the whole curriculum and also to gain the maximal capability for the students in different
classes. By making use of the proposed capability-based course timetabling approach, in
addition to gaining the maximum number and variety of capabilities, it is also intended to
assign the opened courses to the proper time slots by minimizing the distance between time
differences of the given courses by each lecturer. Moreover, another objective is also
formulated as an aggregated penalty function to minimize the weighted deviations in all the
soft constraints. To handle these conflicting objectives simultaneously and to produce
compromise course timetables for the university department managers, a fuzzy goal
programming approach with different importance and priorities is applied. Finally, the
validity and applicability of the proposed capability-based course timetabling approach are
also demonstrated by a real-life case study at DEU Industrial Engineering department.