a multi-objective bisexual reproduction genetic algorithm for ...

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3.3.4 Central Office Staff: This is a person who works in the central office of the
university. The central office staff will activate the course scheduling system to
schedule all courses for the whole university.
3.3.5 University Information System: This is a system actor that includes a
database and a database management system. It is responsible for storing and
managing the data of the university.
3.4 The Proposed Course Scheduling System
This section presents the proposed system through a scheduling strategy and the
system architecture.
3.4.1 The Scheduling Strategy
In general, there are two approaches to the course scheduling problem, namely
centralized and de-centralized. Both approaches have their own advantages and
disadvantages.
The centralized approach uses software to schedule the timetable for the entire
of the university. This software has a global view of the problem, presenting all the
information necessary to most effectively create a timetable. Unfortunately, the size
of the problem is too big, so the course scheduling program is unable to create a good
timetable. Furthermore, the co-operation between faculties and the central scheduling
office is also a difficult problem [5].
The de-centralized approach lets each faculty schedule its own timetable using
its own resources. However, this approach rapidly becomes infeasible when there are
shared resources across faculties. This approach can only work well if the
communication between faculties is reduced to a minimum [5]. Our study proposes a
hybrid centralized and de-centralized approach. The centralized course scheduling
program only schedules for shared resources whereas the decentralized course
scheduling program schedules for the remaining resources of each faculty. The
proposed course scheduling system is shown in Figure 3-3.
The proposed system is designed to consist of jobs that are processed in parallel.
After clients at all faculties send their own data used in course scheduling to the
Central Manager Host, a client in the central office will run the course scheduling
program. In turn, the following three stages will be performed automatically.