IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION, VOL. 51, NO.
4, NOVEMBER 2008
Efficient Fuzzy Evolutionary Algorithm-Based
Approach for Solving the Student
Project Allocation Problem
Dipti Srinivasan, Senior Member, IEEE, and Lily Rachmawati, Student Member, IEEE
Abstract—This paper presents a solution framework for the
student project allocation (SPA) problem which is based on evo-
lutionary algorithms (EAs), a biologically inspired stochastic,
population-based search paradigm. Project-based assessment is a
common component of engineering courses that are conducted in
universities around the world. In their final year of study, a list of
projects is made available by the academic staff and students are
required to select a specific number of options from this list. The
department then assigns a suitable project to each student such that
preferred projects can be allocated to as many students as possible.
While student interest is the primary criteria, several additional
factors need to be considered such as project prerequisites, load
balancing of staff commitments, and other specific university
requirements. The allocation problem can therefore be seen as a
complex multiobjective problem with multiple constraints. The
EA-based project allocation system was recently developed and
implemented in a large university department to automate this
process, and to improve the matching of students to their desired
projects. The solution which provides the highest level of satisfac-
tion in meeting the varied objectives is then used to allocate projects
to students. This new automated system is not only able to achieve
a very high level of user satisfaction, but is also able to do so in a
very short time, resulting in significant time savings.
Index Terms—Evolutionary algorithm (EA), hybrid fuzzy evolu-
tionary algorithm, student project allocation (SPA) problem.
I. INTRODUCTION
ROJECT-BASED assessment is a common component of
P engineering courses conducted in universities around the
world, with final-year students often being required to embark
on a project that typically spans two semesters. The aim of this
component is to encourage students to learn how to apply skills
acquired in the classroom and to contemplate innovative ways
of solving problems. The final-year projects (FYPs) are usu-
ally open-ended in nature, giving the students flexibility in ju-
diciously selecting viable alternatives, and challenging them to
innovate in terms of initiating new concepts and designs [7].
The benefits of this exercise include the intrinsic rewards that
come with solving real-life problems and the inculcation of the
skills necessary for independent learning. It is believed that such
projects lay the foundation for lifelong learning.
Manuscript received November 23, 2006; revised July 25, 2007. Current ver-
sion published November 5, 2008.
The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engi-
neering, National University of Singapore, Singapore 119260, Singapore
(e-mail: dipti@nus.edu.sg).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TE.2007.912537
0018-9359/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE
439
Typically, a list of projects is proposed by the university’s aca-
demic staff and by researchers from institutions within the uni-
versity. Students are required to select a specific number of these
projects, list them in order of preference, and submit the list to
their department. The challenge of finding a satisfactory match
between students and the available projects, given overlapping
student choices and other university requirements, brings about
what is known as the student project allocation (SPA) problem.
This problem has repeatedly proven to be computationally de-
manding and time-consuming. The sheer size of the solution
space means that the probability of finding an optimal solution
using conventional resource allocation approaches is very small
[1]–[6]. A “satisfactory” allocation is one that can be deemed
both effective and efficient [1], [2], such that it optimizes stu-
dent satisfaction while dealing suitably with the combinatorial
complexity of the problem.
In large university departments, the allocation of projects to
students is typically performed manually by a human decision
maker (DM) in a process that requires several iterations and
takes several weeks to complete. Over the past few years, sev-
eral techniques have been proposed to solve such complex re-
source allocation problems [1]–[4]. However, most of these ap-
proaches cannot be directly applied to the SPA problem in large
universities because there are simply too many conflicting goals
and constraints. The purpose of this paper is to present a novel
method of addressing the SPA problem, taking into account all
of the considerations that have been raised so far: computational
efficiency, student satisfaction, and departmental satisfaction.
Keeping in mind the limited number of published works in
the field of SPA, the following is a review of promising de-
velopments that have occurred in the last few years. An expert
system in this particular application domain was designed and
presented by Teo and Ho in [5]. This knowledge-based model
was applied to a single-objective SPA problem on a dataset in-
volving 413 projects and 330 pairs of students who were allowed
to submit a list of up to ten projects in order of preference. The
algorithm operated in a sequential manner through the list of
preferences. A project preferred by a student-pair is allocated di-
rectly when there is no competition for that project. Otherwise,
the project is allocated randomly to one of the competing stu-
dent-pairs. Thus, the algorithm proceeds with the next-ranked
preferences for student pairs yet to be allocated any projects.
The algorithm managed to allocate a project within the preferred
list of 10 projects to 79.9% of the student pairs.
In [6], Anwar and Bahaj proposed an integer programming
approach which consumes less computational time. Their in-
440 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION, VOL. 51, NO. 4, NOVEMBER 2008

teger programming algorithm solved the same SPA problem in- II. THE STUDENT PROJECT ALLOCATION PROBLEM
stance as in [5] in just 6.66 minutes. However, on the down side,
Mathematically, the SPA problem is very similar to that de-
fewer student pairs were allocated projects that were ranked
scribed in [5] and [6]. The allocation of the FYPs is carried out
highly in their preferences using this method than by using that
as follows. A list of projects are proposed by academics within
of Teo and Ho in [5].
the department and by professionals working in several research
Both methods make significant strides towards feasibly
centres within the university. Faculty members propose projects
solving the SPA problem using nonhuman means, yet neither
by accessing a form where they provide the project title, a brief
provides the desirable compromise between computation com-
description, keywords, and information on any special skills or
plexity and student satisfaction. Further, SPA problems often
interests required. Each project has a unique project ID, and is
involve additional objectives, which are in conflict with student
recorded in a database. The list of projects is released to stu-
satisfaction. An important example of such an objective is the
dents, who are asked to select eight projects, rank their choices,
institutional requirement that there be a fair distribution of
and submit them online. Each student also has an associated
projects across staff supervisors. The lexicographic approach
cumulative average point (CAP), which is a measure of aca-
amenable to the methods in [5] and [6] is less appealing be-
demic performance (based on a scale of 0–5). The project allo-
cause this approach imposes a rigid preference structure. Little
cation exercise is carried out after all the students in the cohort
flexibility with respect to preference of tradeoff among the
have submitted the lists of their preferred projects. Typically, the
objectives is possible. This paper presents an evolutionary al-
number of students ranges between 500–650, and each project
gorithm (EA)-based project allocation system which is capable
allocation exercise involves 85–100 academic supervisors and
of efficiently finding an allocation scheme characterized by a
600–800 projects. The allocation results are announced to the
high student satisfaction level. Further, the EA may be easily
students one month before the start of the academic year.
modified to accommodate multiple conflicting objectives in a
The SPA problem is described as follows.
manner that allows the DM to specify his/her preference.
Let
The variant of the EA which caters to multiobjective SPA
1)
problems employs fuzzy aggregation to evaluate the desirability
be the set of students, , and the corresponding CAP
of tradeoff between objectives. The state of the art in evolu-
of the student;
tionary multiobjective optimization pursues a set of nondom-
2) be the set of subdepart-
inated solutions displaying different tradeoffs, and requires a
ments;
DM to choose from this set of optimal solutions [8]–[12]. The
3) be the set of staff supervi-
multiobjective formulation of the SPA problem presented here
sors;
deviates from the norm in employing a fuzzy, nonlinear aggrega-
4) be the set of projects
tion of objectives to evaluate the quality of candidate solutions.
offered.
The departure is motivated by the fact that in most multiobjec-
Each student is allowed to ballot for projects in order of
tive SPA problems, the DM has some notion of the acceptable
preference. Given these parameters, the goal is to find the pair
tradeoffs between objectives. Embedding this knowledge into
, for all , such that each student is assigned
the search process increases both its efficiency and effective-
a different project. Also, in such a single-objective formulation,
ness. The notion of acceptable tradeoffs is imprecise. Hence, it
the result of the project allocation process must optimize the
is best captured in terms of fuzzy rules and fuzzy membership
overall level of student satisfaction This problem can be defined
functions. The objectives are aggregated into a measure of the
as follows:
quality of candidate solutions based on the rules, membership
functions and operators. The resulting hybrid fuzzy-EA system
utilizes the search capability of EA and the mathematical fa-
cilities of fuzzy logic to express the imprecise knowledge of (1)
the DM. The hybrid fuzzy multiobjective EA (F-MOEA) thus
guides the solution to regions in the objective space where trade- where is the project allocated to student and
offs between objectives are desirable to the DM. is a function which returns the order of in ’s ballot list.
For completeness, both the single-objective optimization of If is not found in the list, a constant , where is
student satisfaction and the multiobjective optimization are the maximum number of projects a student may ballot for, is
presented in this paper. According to the particular needs of returned. A decrease in indicates that, on average, students
the institution, either approach could be readily adopted. The are assigned projects higher in their ranking of preferences.
EA-based project allocation system that has been used for the In actual practice, a more reasonable allocation would involve
past three years has not only resulted in a multifold reduction satisfying several objectives and criteria, some of which could
in time and improved matching of students to their desired be conflicting with each other. In this paper, the multiobjective
projects, but has done so while balancing various objectives formulation of the SPA problem involves four additional depart-
and constraints. The Sections II–V describe the context of the mental objectives. These objectives are described as follows.
current study, and demonstrate the workings and utility of the 1) Variation in loading across the subdepartments.
proposed approach. An application of the EA to three real Subdepartments may offer differing numbers of projects
datasets demonstrates the ability of the proposed approach to depending on their available resources; for instance, a sub-
find a project allocation that satisfies the criteria set. department with fewer staff supervisors will offer fewer
SRINIVASAN AND RACHMAWATI: EFFICIENT FUZZY EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHM-BASED APPROACH
projects. In order to optimize the allocation of resources
dedicated to supervision, it is desirable to have proportion-
ately similar loading across subdepartments. The expected
number of students assigned to the subdepartment , is
defined as follows:
(2)
where is the total number of students and the total
number of projects. Let be the number of students assigned
to the subdepartment , a measure of loading spread
across the subdepartments is defined as follows:
(3)
2) Variation in loading across staff supervisors.
Depending on their resources, workload and schedule, su-
pervisors may each propose a different number of projects.
Frequently, it is the case that a large number of students se-
lect projects offered by a small number of popular staff su-
pervisors as their most preferred option. This leaves other
staff who offers less popular projects with few or no stu-
dent. Thus, efforts to balance the workload of staff mem-
bers (such that the staff-student ratio is minimized) often
come into conflict with efforts to optimize the allocation of
projects according to the preferences of the students. The
expected number of students each staff member oversees
can be defined as follows:
(4)
where is the total number of students and the total
number of projects.
Let be the number of students assigned to staff advisor
. A measure of the spread of loading across staff members
is given by
(5)
3) Spread of academic achievement of assigned students
across subdepartments.
It is in the interest of the department to have a uniform
spread of academic achievement among the students as-
signed to each subdepartment. This is to avoid a situation
where a majority of the high-performing students are clus-
tered in one particular subdepartment and low-performing
students are clustered in another. Let be the mean CAP
across the cohort and be the mean CAP of students as-
signed to projects in subdepartment . The spread of stu-
dents with respect to academic achievement is defined
as follows:
(6)
441
4) Spread of academic achievement of assigned students
across academic supervisors.
Just as it is desirable to have an even spread of good stu-
dents across subdepartments, department administrators
also find it desirable to balance the spread of academi-
cally-good students across academic supervisors. Let
be the mean CAP of students assigned to projects under
advisor . The spread of student academic performance
across staff members is defined as follows:
III. AN EA FOR SINGLE-OBJECTIVE SPA PROBLEMS
Evolutionary algorithms have earned wide popularity due
to their ability to solve complex optimization problems in the
presence of multiple objectives and constraints [8]–[12]. The
EA-based solution approach presented in this paper was there-
fore developed and implemented for automating the project
allocation process. The allocation was based on students’ choice
of eight projects in their interest area. Before this algorithm was
implemented three years ago, the process of allocating projects
to students was done manually, using a heuristic approach.
Finding a good solution was a very time consuming process,
taking up to a month each time. An expert system based on
heuristics similar to that employed by Teo and Ho [5] was also
developed and tested before the EA-based allocation algorithm
was implemented. The proposed algorithm not only resulted in
higher success rates in allocating projects, but also allowed the
DM to obtain and analyze numerous allocation combinations
before deciding on the best combination to adopt.
The EA is so-called because of its mimicry of the biolog-
ical processes of selection, recombination and mutation in com-
putational operations, so as to arrive at optimal solutions to
a problem. The computational operators of selection, recom-
bination and mutation are applied iteratively to a set of pos-
sible solutions in order to move incrementally towards an op-
timum, as defined by the objective function. Selection discards
low-performing solutions; recombination hybridizes a number
of high-performing solutions to obtain even better solutions; and
mutation introduces small solution variations that allow for a
local search of better solutions in the neighborhood. The three
main processes are repeated until a stopping criterion (usually
the maximum number of iterations) is satisfied (Fig. 1).
To solve the SPA problem using an EA, a representation
scheme which facilitates the computational evolutionary oper-
ators is proposed as follows. Each candidate solution denotes a
complete project assignment for the cohort and is represented
as a string of positive integers denoting project IDs (Fig. 2).
Each position in the string corresponds to a student in the cohort
to whom the project represented by the integer is allocated.
Initially, a number of such candidate solutions are generated
using a two-stage process. Let the number of solutions within
the population be denoted as . To generate a candidate
solution, students chosen in random succession are assigned a
project picked randomly from within their own eight choices.
442
Fig. 1. Block diagram of EA.
Fig. 2. Candidate solution representation (P denotes the project ID assigned
to student n).
Fig. 3. Hybridization of two candidate solutions (crossover).
Some students are not assigned any projects by the end of this
stage because of the competition for popular projects. These
students are allocated projects randomly from the list of free
projects. The randomness helps alleviate possible bias arising
from the order in which students are encoded in the represen-
tation scheme. Such initialization ensures that each student is
allocated a unique project in the candidate solutions.
The stopping criterion in the proposed EA is defined as the
maximum number of iterations and is denoted by MAXITER,
which is set to zero at initialization. Following the initialization
of candidate solutions, a binary tournament with replacement
is applied to the group of candidate solutions. At each round,
two candidate solutions are chosen randomly and evaluated in
terms of , which is the objective function in the optimization.
The solution with the lower value of is selected to be the first
parent . The random selection of two candidate solutions is
performed again to obtain the second parent . and
The pair, , is then subjected to a process of hybridiza-
tion (Fig. 3) with a probability of to generate two new can-
didate solutions, and . To construct and , one solu-
tion from and is randomly chosen for each position in
the string. The project ID assigned to the position in the chosen
string is copied to the corresponding position in , unless that
project ID has already been assigned to another position in ,
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION, VOL. 51, NO. 4, NOVEMBER 2008
Fig. 4. Modification to new solutions (mutation).
in which case the position is left unassigned. For the same posi-
tion in , the complementary string is chosen and copied with
the same restriction that project IDs already assigned to other
positions in cannot be reused.
This operation is repeated for all positions in the string while
maintaining corresponding lists of unallocated projects, one
each for and . To avoid positional bias, the order in which
positions in and are chosen is again randomized. Students
corresponding to empty positions in and are assigned
projects randomly from the list of unallocated projects. At the
end of the hybridization process, two new complete project
assignments for the cohort, and , undergo further modifi-
cation with a probability of as illustrated in Fig. 4. For each
new solution, students are randomly selected and assigned
a project from the corresponding students’ ballot list. If the
string contains another student who has been assigned to the
same project ID, this student is assigned a new project that
is randomly selected from the list of available projects. This
modification tweaks new solutions in order to find assignment
schema that are absent in the evolved population. The search
is beneficial when good assignment schema are found and
retained in the successive iterations.
After the modification process, new solutions that have exact
duplicates in the evolved population of solutions are discarded.
The binary tournaments, hybridization and modification, are
repeated until new solutions are obtained. Before pro-
ceeding to the next iteration, both sets of old solutions
new solutions are evaluated and sorted in terms of
their performance based on objective . The top 20% of old
solutions are then combined with the top 80% of new solutions
to make up candidate solutions in the next iteration. Retaining
a number of best candidate solutions from the old population
helps improve the convergence properties of the EA, while
making room for new candidate solutions in the evolutionary
process [8], [9].
SRINIVASAN AND RACHMAWATI: EFFICIENT FUZZY EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHM-BASED APPROACH
TABLE I
OBJECTIVES IMPROVEMENT AND DETERIORATION WITH SINGLE-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATIONS
IV. A HYBRID FUZZY EA FOR MULTIOBJECTIVE
SPA PROBLEMS
In this section, the single-objective EA for solving the SPA
problem (presented in Section III) is modified to accommo-
date four other departmental objectives. The departmental cri-
teria may be described as linguistic, perception-based and ex-
perience-based and can be incorporated into the EA using the
representation and approximate reasoning facilities provided by
fuzzy logic [13], [14]. In particular, the objectives are repre-
sented as fuzzy variables, which act as inputs to a fuzzy infer-
ence system (FIS) evaluating the fitness of the associated candi-
date solution. The reason for incorporating fuzzy logic in this
manner is twofold. First, fuzzy logic offers an effective rep-
resentation and reasoning framework in evaluating the quality
of candidate solutions. Second, the fitness function guides the
search to desirable regions of the fitness space [14] based on the
prespecified preference of the user.
In the heuristic-based method applied to the department’s
SPA problem in the past, the multiple objectives were optimized
in consecutive stages of allocation. Such a lexicographic ap-
proach is less than ideal, as separately optimizing the different
objectives does not give the DM a perspective of the character-
istics of possible tradeoffs.
The hybrid fuzzy-GA approach allows the judgment of the
human DM to motivate the definition of the fitness function. The
human DM considers various objectives and their combined in-
teraction and aggregates the level of satisfaction for all objec-
tives to evaluate a candidate solution’s overall quality. Fuzzy
logic was introduced to capture the DM’s perceptions and rea-
soning in this process and provide an aggregator for the values
of the objective functions. The effect of the incorporation of
fuzzy logic in this manner is the convergence of solutions to-
wards areas where the DM deems a tradeoff between objectives
to be favorable.
To solve the multicriteria problem defined in Section II, a
FIS computes the fitness function in the following manner. In
Section II, five criteria ( , , , , and ) were described.
Results from ten runs of such single-objective optimizations are
presented in Table I. Single-objective optimizations of each the
five criteria reveal that while a minimization of consistently
results in direct degeneration of the other objectives, such con-
flict is not present between , , , and .
Likewise, single-objective optimization of the criteria con-
sistently results in the degeneration of , but brings about small
443
improvement in the other three criteria. Similar effects are ob-
served in the single-objective optimization of , , and .
The investigation demonstrated that no conflict is present be-
tween the last four criteria.
The SPA problem is therefore posed as a biobjective opti-
mization problem with as the first objective function. As the
four criteria are not identical, concurrent, effective optimization
of the four requires that all four criteria ( , , , and ) are
reflected in the fitness function of the EA. This is achieved by
combining the four criteria in a weighted sum, the second ob-
jective function,
(8)
The weights were selected to reflect the relative
emphasis the DM places on each of the criteria , , ,
and . In the implementation described by this paper, the fol-
lowing were selected: , . The
weights corresponding to supervisor satisfaction are set higher
than those corresponding to balance across the subdepartments
as by optimizing the former, the latter is also improved. Because
subdepartmental balance may be improved without sacrificing
balance across supervisors, nonzero weights are attached to
and to attain further possible improvement in the two criteria.
For each candidate solution, and are computed and aggre-
gated by the FIS (Fig. 5) to arrive at a fitness value that reflects
the DM’s evaluation of the corresponding solution.
The values of objective functions and are fuzzified ac-
cording to the membership functions defined for each respective
objective. With the fuzzy quantities as arguments, the fuzzy in-
ference engine evaluates the fuzzy fitness score based on fuzzy
rules and operator definitions. The fitness score is obtained by
defuzzification based on the membership function defined for
fitness values [13]. The database stores the various membership
functions, fuzzy operators and fuzzy rules. A detailed model of
the FIS used in this framework is presented in subsection A,
which follows.
A. FIS Model
The FIS in the proposed approach defines a mapping func-
tion from the objective space to the fitness space,
which is also known as “the decision space.” Let be a candi-
date solution, be the values of objective
functions and fit be the fitness of
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Fig. 5. Block diagram of the fitness function.
Fig. 6. Membership functions for f and f .
where and fit are real numbers. The mapping of to the func-
tion is nonlinear and its definition consists of the following.
1) Membership functions for each of the V inputs. Within
the universe of discourse of input , fuzzy sets
defined by the corresponding membership functions
2) A set of fuzzy rules of the form
where is the -th fuzzy set of the -th input, and
is a real number. The conjunctive term “and” may also be
replaced by the disjunctive term “or.”
3) Mathematical operators for disjunction, conjunction
and implication for evaluating the rules. Disjunction
and conjunction represent an aggregation of the perfor-
mance of a particular candidate solution on the different
objective functions. Disjunction is employed to model
independence between the satisfaction-level of objectives
concerned whereas conjunction represents interdepen-
dence. In the case of independence, a particular amount
of improvement in one of the objectives concerned in-
creases the satisfaction of the DM by the same amount,
irrespective of the performance in the other objectives. In
the case of interdependence, the gain in the DM’s satis-
faction depends both on the magnitude of improvement
and the associated performance in the other objectives.
In this paper, addition and multiplication are employed
for disjunction and conjunction [14]. Implication is
achieved with a weighted-average of the consequents
in the fuzzy rules. Fuzzy inference may be viewed as a
prototype-matching exercise, in which input data which
corresponds to unity membership in the defined fuzzy sets
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION, VOL. 51, NO. 4, NOVEMBER 2008
act as the prototype. The rules specify in the consequent
the outputs for a particular prototypical combination of
input data. Averaging constitutes interpolation to obtain
are output for nonprototypical inputs. The weights reflect the
. degree of similarity between the input data and the defined
prototypes. For a given input , the output
of the FIS is given by the following fitness score:
(10)
where is the activation strength of rule
(11)
For a disjunction of terms, the operator is replaced by .
The design of the FIS components (membership functions
and rules) is based on a DM’s expert knowledge. The mem-
bership functions for each input reflects the DM’s perception
of the value of each individual objective. The antecedent part of
the fuzzy rule expresses combinations of objective values and
the consequent part reflects the DM’s preference for the asso-
ciated combination. This preference reflects the importance of
objectives relative to all other combinations of objectives. The
rule-base could be constructed either manually, when not many
rules are involved, or by conducting a survey of the DM’s pref-
erences and then employing available techniques to construct an
FIS from the data.
The membership functions for each input and output are
designed according to the DM’s perception of the quantities.
Three membership functions corresponding to three granular-
ities [small (S), medium (M), and large (L)] were designed
for objectives and (Fig. 6). Fuzzy rules were manually
designed, resulting in the fitness landscape illustrated in Fig. 7.
SRINIVASAN AND RACHMAWATI: EFFICIENT FUZZY EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHM-BASED APPROACH
Fig. 7. Fitness landscape.
A high level of fitness represents a desirable combination of
and values.
The landscape also captures the preference of over
(a 10% improvement in is rewarded with higher scores than
the same improvement in , other variables being constant).
The fitness function favours the propagation of individuals
with favorable tradeoffs of and via the mechanism
of selection at both the pre-recombination and population
replacement stages. Further fine-tuning may be required if
the FIS does not focus the search on the desired region of the
objective space. As a rule of thumb, shifting the membership
of fuzzy sets describing the desired optimum (i.e., “small” for
minimization problems and “large” for maximization problem)
towards the ideal optima increases the relative importance of
the objective.
V. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
This section presents the results obtained on three datasets
(DS-1, DS-2, and DS-3) using the single-objective algorithm
presented in Section III, as well as the multiobjective fuzzy algo-
rithm described in Section IV. Further, the heuristic presented
by Teo and Ho [5] was implemented and applied to the same
datasets. The datasets DS-1, DS-2, and DS-3 were obtained
from three cohorts of 575, 519, and 544 students, respectively.
The number of projects offered by academic staff members were
629, 764, and 762, respectively. The allocation effort involved
four subdepartments with about 90 academic supervisors.
The experiments were conducted on a Pentium IV 3.0 GHz
CPU. Each run of the algorithms on these data sets produced a
population of 150 candidate solutions over MAXITER
iterations, which consumed an average of 50 minutes of CPU
time. Results of the application of these algorithms are presented
in Table II. The success rate is measured in terms of student sat-
isfaction, and defined as the percentage of students who were al-
located a project of their choice. The average computation time
taken by the expert system-based algorithm was 24 hours, while
the time taken by the single-objective EA was 50 minutes. The
F-MOEA took longer (three hours) due to the additional calcu-
lations necessary to evaluate the various objectives. In terms of
computing time, all these approaches compare very well to the
manual approach which took approximately four weeks to find
a reasonably good solution.
445
On all three data sets, the expert system based on heuris-
tics achieved a lower success rate compared to the EA-based
methods (Table II). Although the use of the expert system
(which sequentially allocates the first choices, then the second
and so on) resulted in similar or larger percentage of students
being assigned their first choice, the EAs produced a more
balanced allocation that maximized overall levels of student
satisfaction. A larger percentage of students were allocated one
of their first three choices as a result of the single-objective EA
(75.7%, 85.16%, and 81.12% for DS-1, DS-2, and DS-3, re-
spectively) than through the heuristic method (70.2%, 73.30%,
and 70.92% for DS-1, DS-2, and DS-3, respectively). Cor-
responding figures for the biobjective F-MOEA are 74.26%,
80.26%, and 78.7% for DS-1, DS-2, and DS-3, respectively.
While the single-objective EA produces several solutions at
each iteration (the best of which can be used for project alloca-
tion), the solutions obtained from the fuzzy multiobjective algo-
rithm show a simultaneous optimization of various objectives.
There were different tradeoffs between the objectives, one of
which was chosen based on the DM’s preference.
A number of results with slightly differing tradeoff character-
istics were obtained at the end of the experiments. The results
for DS-3 are plotted in Fig. 8 in terms of the numeric values of
and as defined in Sections II and IV, respectively. Note
that the results were concentrated on a small area in the objec-
tive function space and that all the final solutions were of high
quality, with a success rate ranging from 92.0% to 97.2%. A so-
lution with a reasonable tradeoff between and was finally
selected for implementation.
The multiobjective variant (F-MOEA) can be said to find a
balance between the various objectives mentioned in Section II.
Across the three data sets, the biobjective F-MOEA is observed
to attain lower allocation success in comparison to the single-ob-
jective EA. The detriment in student satisfaction is traded-off
for a more equitable spread across the supervisors and subde-
partments. The allocation results from the single-objective EA
are characterized by an uneven spread of students across subde-
partments and across academic supervisors. One subdepartment
was assigned too many students, while another had too few stu-
dents. Additionally, there was a poor balance of load across staff
members. The maximum student to staff ratio observed is 10 : 1
(two cases) and the minimum is 4 : 1 (five cases). In contrast, the
F-MOEA results in an almost perfect equalization of the load
across subdepartments and staff supervisors. Fig. 9 shows the
deviation of the obtained student-staff assignments from the ex-
pected number, averaged over the results obtained from the three
data sets.
In allocation schemes produced by the single-objective EA,
considerable variation in the average CAP of assigned students
across the four subdepartments is observed. The range is 0.25
and the standard deviation 0.10. The corresponding figures for
staff members are 2 and 0.3039, respectively. The F-MOEA,
on the other hand, yielded a more uniform distribution of CAP
among the academic supervisors. Across subdepartments, the
average CAP of assigned students had a range of 0.05 and a stan-
dard deviation of 0.02. Across the staff supervisors, the average
CAP had a range of 1.2 and a standard deviation of 0.17, indi-
cating a fairer distribution compared to the other two algorithms.
446
TABLE II
PROJECT ALLOCATION RESULT: PERCENTAGE OF STUDENTS ALLOCATED PROJECTS OF THEIR CHOICE
Fig. 8. The f and f scores of final candidate solutions for DS-3.
Fig. 9. Deviation in the number of assigned students from the expected number
across staff supervisors.
By incorporating the DM’s perceptions and reasoning in eval-
uating the fitness of candidate solutions, the multiobjective EA
guided the population stochastically to the desired regions in the
objective space. Further, the simultaneous optimization allowed
the exploration of tradeoffs between the objectives, which may
differ from one problem instance to another. The results indicate
the clear superiority of this algorithm over the heuristics-based
expert system and the single-objective EA.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION, VOL. 51, NO. 4, NOVEMBER 2008
The F-MOEA also shows distinct advantages over the
two-stage optimization strategy proposed by Anwar and Bahaj
[6] in which the two objectives are optimized separately.
This approach is suitable when a number of hard boundaries
exist. However, SPA problems often involve criteria with soft
negotiable boundaries. For instance, a slight deterioration in
the staff loading balance may be acceptable if this allows for
a significant improvement in student satisfaction. Also, when
N objectives are involved, the approach put forth by Anwar
and Bahaj in [6] requires at least N stages of single-objective
optimization. In contrast, the multiobjective EA proposed in
this paper requires only one stage of optimization.
VI. CONCLUSION
This paper has presented a FYP allocation system that is
based on EAs. It has been developed and implemented in a large
university department in Singapore to automate the process
of project allocation, and to improve the process of matching
students to their desired projects. The project allocation system
assigns a suitable project to each student, maximizing a combi-
nation of several criteria including student preferences, project
prerequisites, and staff loading. The proposed single-objective
and multiobjective algorithms were extensively tested on real
datasets and their performance was compared with a heuris-
tics-based expert system approach. The algorithms obtained
excellent results within a reasonable time frame. Despite its
longer computation time and slightly lower success rate, the
F-MOEA achieved a balanced distribution of students across
subdepartments and supervisors.
Although the two variants of the EA were developed for a spe-
cific SPA problem, the algorithm can be adapted for other SPA
problems with little modification. In contrast, the manual design
of the FIS in the multiobjective variant may prove to be a bot-
tleneck for an SPA problem with more objectives. The authors
suggest that future efforts be channelled towards supporting the
automated design of the fuzzy rule base. Such support could be
in the form of surveys of the preferences of DMs such that mem-
bership functions and fuzzy rules can be developed using data
mining techniques.
SRINIVASAN AND RACHMAWATI: EFFICIENT FUZZY EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHM-BASED APPROACH
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Dipti Srinivasan (S’91–M’97–SM’02) received the Ph.D. degree in engi-
neering from the National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore, in 1994.
She worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California,
Berkeley, from 1994 to 1995 before joining NUS, where she is an Associate
Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She was
a Visiting Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian In-
stitute of Science, Bangalore, India, from 1998 to 1999. Her research interest
is in application of soft computing techniques to engineering optimization and
control problems.
Lily Rachmawati (S’06) received the B.Eng. degree from the National Univer-
sity of Singapore (NUS), Singapore, in 2004.
She is working towards the Ph.D. degree at NUS. Her research interests in-
clude multiobjective optimization, evolutionary computing techniques, and hy-
brid computational intelligence techniques.