Abstract
This article describes a project undertaken at the Islamic University in Gaza. The project aims at designing a general academic departmental plan of study using binary goal programming. The design process includes balancing the assignment of courses to semesters. Soft and hard constraints are first identified based on interviews with academic experts. Then, a model that uses multiple criteria programming is built and used to construct the plan of study of the industrial engineering department at the Islamic University in Gaza. To determine the weights of the criteria, the researcher attempted to use Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). However, after interviewing the experts, it was concluded that pre-emptive goal programming is recommended. The model was then solved using LP-Solve software. The resulting plan of study clearly outperforms the manually designed one. A comparison between the newly designed plan of study and the existing one in terms of each of the criteria shows that the overall objective function could be greatly improved. Furthermore, the systematic formulation of the problem revealed that some constraints are unaccounted for in the manually designed plan. The model can be easily extended to include more objectives and constraints and can also be applied to other departments.
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