Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2005

Publication Title

International Journal of Technology in Teaching and Learning

Volume

1

Issue

2

First Page

63

Last Page

78

Abstract

Academic course scheduling is a complex operation that requires the interaction between different users including instructors and course schedulers to satisfy conflicting constraints in an optimal manner. Traditionally, this problem has been addressed as a constraint satisfaction problem where the constraints are stationary over time. In this paper, we address academic course scheduling as a dynamic decision support problem using an agent-enabled adaptive decision support system. In this paper, we describe the Intelligent Agent Enabled Decision Support (IAEDS) system, which employs software agents to assist humans in making strategic decisions under dynamic and uncertain conditions. The IAEDS system has a layered architecture including different components such as a learning engine that uses historic data to improve decision-making and an intelligent applet base that provides graphical interface templates to users for frequently requested decision-making tasks. We illustrate an application of our IAEDS system where agents are used to make complex scheduling decisions in a dynamically changing environment.

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