15 - programa de pós graduação em métodos numéricos da ufpr ...

ABSTRACT
Historically in Brazil, the education institutions had never been seen as business organizations
suitable for application of administration science. For this reason, the sector is in crisis. Today
the private education institutions suffers the same problems faced by most organizations:
competition. Among the solutions to escape the crisis, optimization of resources is a major
"medicine" for the disease in the sector. Studies show that the cost with the professors at an
education institution can reach more than 50% of overall costs. Therefore, the optimization of
these resources is inevitable for the rationalization of costs. Allocating subjects in appropriate
periods of the courses further their unification, leading the optimization of professors. This is
entirely feasible in free courses, courses offered at colleges, post-graduate and traditional
graduate courses where you have modular curriculum structure. However, the allocation of
subjects should be done with great caution. The change in the sequence of subjects of a course
is limited because we know that the subjects, even when not needs pre-formal requirements,
must be offered in a logical sequence in order to not compromise the learning of students.
Analyzing the process of students formation, realizes that this process have a very close
relationship with any manufacturing process, composed of items and lots of production,
machines, scheduling, and other things. So you can see the optimization of professors as an
appropriate scheduling subject to constraints. For this research the main constraints are due to
the mess caused by the sequencing of the curriculum subjects. Thus, the objective of this
research was to develop a methodology that allows getting the best sequence of subjects for
the classes of a course in order to maximize the unification of subjects without compromising
the quality of learning of the students. This research provides a contribution to science due to
the generation of indicators that assess the degree of mess of the curriculum, because of the
subjectivity of the problem. These indicators serve as constraints for the system optimization,
and have the task of balancing cost-effective. The process of optimization was performed by
Tabu Search, because the use of exact methods are not viable for this type of problem. The
system optimization has been applied in two technologist degree course with distinct
characteristics, from different institutions. The results obtained with the use of the Tabu
Search were fully satisfactory, because it generated significant optimization in the
experiments.
Key Words: Subjects optimization, tabu search, indicators of mess in the curriculum, subjects
scheduling.
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