Multi-Agent Coalition Formation for Course Selection Strategies in E-Learning System
SITM, Lucknow, U.P., India, Swati Basak, Bireshwar Dass Mazumdar · International Journal of Mathematics Trends and Technology · 2014
Multi Agent Systems are being used in a wide variety of applications, ranging from comparatively small systems for personal assistance, to open, complex, systems for industrial applications. In e-learning, Multi Agent Systems appear to be a promising approach to deal with the challenges in educational environments. They can provide new patterns of learning and applications, such as personal assistants, user guides and alternative help systems, which are helpful for both students and teachers. In this work, we presented a multi- agent system based for this e-learning scenario based on course selection theory. We have described here coalition formation among the student agents who are going to select the courses which will be running in the university. We first introduced a novel voting procedure where agents make coalition among them & allocate points to different courses and voting occurs for subject/course in several rounds. This way the agents are able to freely express their preferences and at the same time use the information provided from previous rounds to vote intelligently and strategically. We then introduced different voting strategies for subject/course selection in the university by coalition, and evaluated their performance in a range of scenarios. The results show that even a simple voting strategy provides outcomes which are close to optimal. Furthermore, our intelligent strategy was unable to exploit other, more native voters.