An interactive decision support system for course assignment.

Abstract

This thesis proposes to assist administrators and instructors in their task of assigning instructors to courses while respecting resources, goals and preferences of the members of the academic unit and its students. The analysis of the different methods and models used to assign courses to instructors leads to the development of a new mathematical model that retains most of the advantages of previous ones while being simple and efficient enough to be implemented in a real administrative context. The new model is used to design a flexible, interactive and customizable decision support software to allocate courses to faculty members and maintain the derived selections. This decision support software relies on a database system with modelling and optimization capabilities. The methodology is applied to the course assignment problem faced each year by the Faculty of Administration of the University of Ottawa and reports actual course assignment exercises.