PANDEMIC-BASED SCHOOL CLASSES SCHEDULING AUTOMATION ALGORITHM: PALESTINIAN SCHOOLS AS A TESTING CASE

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Date
2022-03-29
Authors
Mukhaimer, Eman
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Publisher
جامعة النجاح الوطنية
Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the distance learning was proposed as a vital solution to go on with the teaching/learning process and to keep both students and teachers (elementary and/or higher education) in contact with the avoidance of possible infection between them. However, despite the distance education offers and despite its role in eliminating the amounts of infections, it suffers from several drawbacks (in some communities): the lack of distance learning experience for both students and teachers, the need of high students’ motivation and the need for sufficient number of devices especially if the family has more than one school/college student. The purpose of this study is to propose a solution for the last problem (considering elementary education) by the proper scheduling of school classes’ sessions considering all of the affecting parameters like the number of lessons per teacher, the number of brothers students and the number of devices per family. The study is applied for 4 different school subjects: Arabic, English, Science and Mathematics and the study considers 4 elementary Palestinian schools to be involved in the study. The problem is modelled as an Integer Programming problem, and it is implemented using Gurobi. Comprehensive experimental tests are executed to compare between our work and the manual preparation of lessons scheduling in which a promising result are achieved. The IP algorithm decreased the number of conflicts by 40%.
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Keywords
School Timetabling, Scheduling, Integer Programming
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