Decision Support System for Managing Educational Capacity and Utilization

Universities and even individual educational institutions, operate with large amounts of data, typically scattered across multiple, non-centralized information systems and applications. Support of administrative decision-making and knowledge discovery from such decentralized data flows requires a system designed with close eye on the specific needs of the academic domain. A strategic approach is needed to plan activities, optimally allocate resources. Such an approach should be based on appropriate inputs allowing decision makers to meet institutional goals by managing the educational resources and availability of faculty at universities or any educational institution at the particular time. The process must admit students in such a manner as to achieve an efficient utilization of university resources. Hence to facilitate strategic decision making, we propose to develop a decision support system, which is primarily concerned with resource allocation and performance analysis. A number of general performance descriptors like staff per student ratio, teaching load, availability of faculty, their experience in teaching the particular domain etc. are used as parameters for our proposed system.