A multi-objective approach for master's thesis committees scheduling using DMEA

In this paper, we propose a multi-objective approach for investigating the Multi-Objective Master's Thesis Committees Scheduling (MMTCS), a practical scheduling problem that arises from our university. For this problem, We need to schedule for a large set of students, each needs an oral defense in front of a committee, given that the time slots, rooms and professors are limited. For it, we first try to derive a mathematical formulation of the problems as a multi-objective problem with a set of hard constraints. We used the satisfaction values of soft constraints as objectives. We adjusted our previous published version of multi-objective evolutionary algorithm to work with this combinatorial problem. We conducted a case study to investigate the problem using our newly multi-objective design. The results showed clearly the efficiency of the multi-objective approach on this problem. The non-dominated solutions showed trade-off between two objectives. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.