Intelligent Agent based Student-Staff Scheduling System
Dwayne Parchment, Suresh Sankaranarayanan · 2013
Creating a Schedule that is fair and is suitable to all parties involved is a difficult task at many universities. It is time- consuming and sometimes doesn't work in the favor of all parties involved. People have been using various computerized appointment systems like Microsoft outlook and so to solve the scheduling problem in Universities and colleges. In addition to the use of ICT in appointment system, there is still involvement of human being towards scheduling of appointment. In the field of computing, the use of software agents to automate task has been on the lips of every computer scientist. Multi-agent system technology has become a popular paradigm over the few years in the design modeling and implementation of software solutions. So, based on that there has been a quite an amount of work done on the use of Software agents towards automating the scheduling system from desktop which is evident from the literature. But still there exist drawbacks in the existing system. The use of Mobile Phones has been an ever growing phenomenon since the early 1990s. The main stakeholders in the educational system including lecturer and students have been partakers of this phenomenon where the cell phone has become a part of their daily lives with the inclusion of other ICT devices into the educational sector. So taking this in mind work was carried out towards scheduling appointment for students using Agents from Android handset recently. There were a few drawbacks in the existing system, like no provision of scheduling between lecturer and Lecturer, and it did not take into consideration the time span between the scheduling, rescheduling and cancellation of appointment and the actual start of the appointment. Another drawback of the previous work was the fact that the appointment diary of the lecturer could not be seen. Last but not the least negotiation between Scheduler agent and lecturer agent can be carried out only if the lecturer's mobile handset is on as the fuzzy preference logic for appointment negotiation resides on the mobile side which is a bit of drawback. This research here seeks to alleviate the above mentioned problem by incorporating software agents on Android enabled handset into the educational arena in an effort to solve scheduling appointments woes. Also in this research, it allows the scheduling and cancellation of appointments based on some time period validation. The Smart agents utilize the properties of autonomy and mobility to intelligently schedule appointments on behalf of the lecturer. JADE-LEAP on the latest Android handset has been the selection of choice to develop the proposed system.