Optimization of the allocation of students into academic programmes using goal programming

• Main Authors: Halim, B.A (Author), Hassan, N. (Author), Rashid, N.R.M (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Akademi Sains Malaysia, 2020
• Subjects: Affirmative; Allocation; Constraints; Decision; Goal; Pre-emptive; Priority; Weighted mean
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher; View in Scopus
• ISBN: 18236782 (ISSN)
• ISSN: 18236782 (ISSN)
• DOI: 10.32802/ASMSCJ.2020.SM26(2.18)

The rapid rate of technological development and the growing complexity of society in recent years have brought renewed awareness of the importance of higher education. As this sector is increasing in size and quality, higher education administrators are facing difficulties in allocating students into certain programmes. However, the modelling to determine the number of student enrolment is given less priority. Hence there is a need of a systematic approach and dynamic planning for the efficient allocation of students in programmes offered by institutions of higher learning. This research represents a goal programming model where each constraint is given the priority for the optimization problem of the student enrolment in an institution of higher learning by considering the number of expertise of lecturers and the capacity students for each programme. This goal programming model was applied to one of the departments of a faculty in a public university in Malaysia. The data was collected from the programme coordinator and the Academic Affairs Office. Then, the LINGO Software was used to run the model. The results of the pre-emptive model were then compared to the current allocation of students using the weighted Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). The successful application represents the ability of the goal programming model to comply with the student intake admission and goal constraints of the academic programmes. © 2020.