Eureka! Institutional Repository

Intelligent Agents technology is gaining a lot of supporters nowadays. Therefore, using a multiagent system, in which Teacher and Student Agents cooperate and interact with the Programmer Agent to generate a timetable program that would satisfy all participants, is extremely interesting. The aim of this thesis was to study the use of Multi-Agent Systems in solving the Timetabling Problem.As a case study we created the timetable program for the Department of Information Technology, of ATEI Thessaloniki. After a statistical invastigation in the department, we implemented three Agent classes (Programmer Agent, Teachers Agents and Students Agents) who communicate and cooperate by exchanging FIPA-ACL messages. The system developed is based on three negotiation phases. In the first two phases, the Teachers and Students Agents send their preferences freely, while in the third phase the Teacher Agents are advised to choose timeslots through a persuasion protocol, which is used by the Programmer Agent from a list of possible solutions to the problem. The whole process is implemented in the programming language Java, using the JADE platform and the environment of eclipse. In the context of the thesis we showed the usefulness of the Agents technology and the negotiation between them to solve such complex problems as that of the timetabling. The evaluation of the application developed showed clearly the advandages of this technique over other previous techniques.