Balancing Academic Curriculum Problem Solution: A Discrete Firefly-Based Approach

Abstract

The difficulty of allocating a balanced educational syllabus to academic periods of a curriculum, also known as curriculum balancing, has long been a source of consternation for any institution of higher education attempting to connect learners and teachers. The balanced academic curriculum challenge entails assigning courses to academic times while adhering to all load restrictions and prerequisite requirements. The balanced academic curriculum problem (BACP) includes assigning subjects to class hours that fulfill standards even while managing students’ burden in terms of credits, course load, and perquisites that includes subjects covered in the previous semesters/periods. The number of credits every semester corresponds to the academic load. As a result, educational frameworks must be “balanced,” which means the credits for each period should be equivalent in order for students to bear minimum work. As a result, it is desirable to reduce this cost by developing a study plan that employs an algorithm that conducts this work automatically. Using an optimization method, this article provides a solution to the challenge of curricula balancing based on the discrete firefly algorithm (DFA). In research, FA has already been used to solve the BACP problem. However, the basic FA is modified to DFA with a local search mechanism inbuilt that helps to reach optimum solution in less number of iterations. A series of tests on standard and real data instances are done to check the efficiency of the suggested approach, with the objective of producing a platform that would simplify the procedure of building a curriculum system at institutions of higher learning. The results show that the proposed solution obtained a rather rapid solution and hit the recognized optimum in most of the iterations.