Educational resource scheduling based on socio-inspired agents

Revised Selected Papers of 4th International Conference, ICSOFT 2009, Sofia, Bulgaria, July 26-29, 2009.The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20116-5_17Scheduling a set of constrained resources is a difficult task, specially when there is no clear definition of ‘optimal’. When the constraints depend not only on physical or temporal issues but also in human desires or preferences the task gets harder. This is the case of educational resources, for example when a set of students must be distributed into a limited set of laboratories to attend to periodical practical sessions, in this case weekly. The preferences of the students may vary during the process for reasons such as the number of people already in that group. This paper presents a socio–inspired solution implemented as a multiagent system. The agents enroll themselves in the lab sessions based on their preferences and negotiate with other agents, using the resources they already have, to obtain desired groups that were already full.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grants TIN 2007-65989, TIN 2007-64718, and TIN2010-19872