Advances in Artificial Intelligence Research (AAIR), vol.1, no.2, pp.43-51, 2021 (Peer-Reviewed Journal)
Universities have
three main missions which are education, research and community service. The
activities related to these missions gain vitality through the elements of
“human” and “space.” The Human element consisting of academic staff and
administrative staff working in universities represents the university's human
capital. The buildings titled as faculty, vocational school, hospital,
laboratory, research center on the other hand, constitute the elements of
space. These spaces, housing the activities of academic and administrative
staff, also represent the physical capital of universities. Universities not
only need to be continue their education processes successfully, but they
should also be manage to the use of resources in the most effective way. The
classroom is the center of the school activities. Classroom management is very
different from planning and evaluating other space needs. Without an effective
classroom management, the heavy investment in the school system could produce
loss rather than gain. It relates to the effective classroom planning,
management techniques and classroom utilisation in determining accurately how
many students the facilities will adequately support. Classroom
capacity utilization is an economics concept which refers to the extent to
which a higher education institutes or a nation actually uses its available
classroom capacity. Therefore, the relationship between whether used
and how classroom is being used is very important. Classroom utilisation rate
is a percentage-based ratio based on an occupancy rate and frequency rate. The
frequency rate evaluates how many times that classroom is used compared to its
availability, and the occupancy rate evaluates how many users can actually use
the space at one time the classroom is compared to its actual capacity. The
main purpose of this study is to analysis the classroom utilisation effects on
exam timetabling problem with a self-generating memetic algorithm. The results
from the analysis show that classroom utilisation rates for exam timetabling
problem should be addressed fully by top management. This study also offers
that in order to improve the classroom utilisation rate, higher education
institutes should think about the occupancy rate as it is the determining agent
affecting the utilisation rate.