Group Student-Project Allocation Using Constraint Optimization Techniques

Abstract

The allocation of projects to final year students in various disciplines is a major challenge to many universities in Nigeria and elsewhere. In most cases manual method has been the pre-dominant for this activity. However, many problems arise which among other things include project duplication and delay in project activities. Other works concentrated on project allocation with both students and supervisors preferences, which may not be suitable for departments with small number of academics. In order to minimize the chances for these problems to occur, this study presents a constraint optimization approach to solving the student project allocation problem for the Computer Science programme of the Department of Mathematics, Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto. The problem was modelled using constraint optimization (COP) techniques and its prototype was implemented on a Java platform which concentrated largely on students preferences on projects only, to ensure that a maximum number of students got their first choice projects. Upon testing the model, the results obtained showed that 85 out of the 95 students (90%) got allocation in the first round, from which 67 students (73%)got their first choices from the 24 projects supplied by 12 supervisors, which showed maximum allocation of students’ best choices.