Solving Examination Timetabling Problem using Partial Exam Assignment with Great Deluge Algorithm

Constructing a quality solution for the examination timetable problem is a difficult task. This paper presents a partial exam assignment approach with great deluge algorithm as the improvement mechanism in order to generate good quality timetable. In this approach, exams are ordered based on graph heuristics and only selected exams (partial exams) are scheduled first and then improved using great deluge algorithm. The entire process continues until all of the exams have been scheduled. We implement the proposed technique on the Toronto benchmark datasets. Experimental results indicate that in all problem instances, this proposed method outperforms traditional great deluge algorithm and when comparing with the state-of-the-art approaches, our approach produces competitive solution for all instances, with some cases outperform other reported result

Disminución de la mortalidad académica en instituciones de educación básica y media mediante el empleo de técnicas inteligentes en la asignación de horarios

Esta investigación plantea la solución del problema de programación de horarios escolares bajo las características de la escuela pública colombiana incluyendo como factor primordial dentro del proceso de optimización, la ubicación horaria de las asignaturas en función de los ritmos cognitivos que presentan los estudiantes durante la jornada escolar. Para ello, se presenta el desarrollo de una aplicación en la cual se implementaron tres diferentes técnicas inteligentes a través de los cuales se busca la minimización de una función de evaluación que representa la calidad de la solución de acuerdo al enfoque establecido. Los resultados muestran una mayor eficiencia del algoritmo NSGA-II en comparación con los otros dos métodos aplicados al mismo problema y evaluados con la misma métrica. A nivel experimental, la metodología evidencia que los grupos programados mediante la orientación descrita presentan una reducción en los niveles de mortalidad académicaAbstract : This research raises the solution to school timetabling problem under the characteristics of Colombian public school including as a primary factor in the optimization process, the time location of the subjects according to cognitive rhythms presented by students during the school day. For this purpose, a development application is presented in which three different techniques were implemented through which the minimization for a Fitness function is looked for that represents the quality of the solution according to the established approach. The results show a higher efficiency of the NSGA-II algorithm compared to the other two methods applied to the same problem and evaluated with the same metric. At the experimental level, the methodology shows that the programmed groups through the guidance described show a reduction in the academic mortality levelsMaestrí

Strategic and operational services for workload management in the cloud (PhD thesis)

In hosting environments such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds, desirable application performance is typically guaranteed through the use of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), which specify minimal fractions of resource capacities that must be allocated by a service provider for unencumbered use by customers to ensure proper operation of their workloads. Most IaaS offerings are presented to customers as fixed-size and fixed-price SLAs, that do not match well the needs of specific applications. Furthermore, arbitrary colocation of applications with different SLAs may result in inefficient utilization of hosts’ resources, resulting in economically undesirable customer behavior. In this thesis, we propose the design and architecture of a Colocation as a Service (CaaS) framework: a set of strategic and operational services that allow the efficient colocation of customer workloads. CaaS strategic services provide customers the means to specify their application workload using an SLA language that provides them the opportunity and incentive to take advantage of any tolerances they may have regarding the scheduling of their workloads. CaaS operational services provide the information necessary for, and carry out the reconfigurations mandated by strategic services. We recognize that it could be the case that there are multiple, yet functionally equivalent ways to express an SLA. Thus, towards that end, we present a service that allows the provably-safe transformation of SLAs from one form to another for the purpose of achieving more efficient colocation. Our CaaS framework could be incorporated into an IaaS offering by providers or it could be implemented as a value added proposition by IaaS resellers. To establish the practicality of such offerings, we present a prototype implementation of our proposed CaaS framework. (Major Advisor: Azer Bestavros