Crucial based curriculum balancing: A new model for curriculum balancing

The Balanced Academic Curriculum Problem (BACP) aims at scheduling the courses of a curriculum to their respective terms while meeting the prerequisite conditions and balancing the workloads of terms. Different variants of the BACP have been proposed in literature in an attempt to improve the performance and solution quality. In this work, we extend the BACP model by adding a new criterion related to course cruciality. We argue that this work has a direct impact on student success and graduation rates. The proposed framework tends to design a curriculum that will better fit to real life situations by moving the courses with relatively higher crucial values to closest possible terms while meeting all the constraints of BACP. To achieve this goal, curriculum balancing is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem using linear objective functions which is another advantage over other proposed models implemented using quadratic non-linear functions.