A Design of an Agent Based System for Timetabling

Babaagba, Kehinde; Arekete, Samson

Abstract

Time tabling forms an important part of most educational systems. This is because most educational institutes largely rely on time tables for their day to day activities. A number of these institutions rather use the very strenuous and slow manual time tabling systems. This results in problems such as inaccurate and poorly managed timetables. In this paper, we propose a design solution towards solving the timetabling problem which uses agent technology. We also examine how the use of an agent based system can help to solve some of the constraints in time table management. The constraints are categorized as both soft constraint (those constraints which can be violated without having a significant impact on the time table's efficiency) and hard constraints (those constraints that must not be violated else the time table generated will be inefficient). The system was designed using modeling tools from the Unified Modeling Language (UML) set. Program development was done in Java using the Netbeans 7.2 integrated development environment. The Java Agent Development Framework - JADE was adopted as the mobile agent platform. A rudimentary time table was generated as a test case.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: May 1, 2017
• Publication Date: 2017-05
• Deposit Date: Aug 4, 2023
• Journal: International Journal of Engineering Development and Research
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 5
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 1168-1175
• Keywords: Time tabling, Agent technology, Hard and Soft constraints
• Publisher URL: https://www.ijedr.org/viewfull.php?&p_id=IJEDR1702193