Evolutionary Multi-objective Optimization for Scheduling Professor Evaluations in Cuban Higher Education

Abstract

In Cuba, university professors are often evaluated during the development of a class. Scheduling these evaluations along the academic semester is a common task of the head of the department, which must to accomplish several criteria at the same time. Examples of these criteria are the presence of at least one tribunal member of the same academic unit, the presence of at least one tribunal member with equal docent category, the availability and the utilization level of the tribunal members, among others. However, scheduling professor evaluations can become a complex task if several professors and evaluations are considered. With aim of solving this problem, in the present work we proposed a computational approach based on: 1) modelling this task as a multi-objective optimization problem, and 2) solving this problem by adapting a variant of the very well-known evolutionary algorithm, NSGA-II. The results of the performed computational experiments show that our proposals contribute to obtain useful and quality solutions.