ABSTRACT

This project involves the development of a web-based application student project allocation system for use in an academic institution. It is based on an existing program which was recently developed at the university for development studies for project allocation at the department of Computer Science. This existing system takes students list and allocates supervisors to students. The new system uses the same optimization procedures in a more general setting, allowing academic administrators to manage supervising and project allocation. Thus, the focus ofthis project is not on the optimization of algorithms, but rather on generalizing, re-designing and re-engineering the existing system which will result in a flexible and easily re-configurable system for use in a variety of university settings. The application is secured so that only the people responsible are allowed to perform the allocation and to view the sensitive data. The front-end enables the administrators to configure the system in response to changing project regulations and assignment desired data. The system can also be used as a reporting tool regarding project and allocation details. The system is able to check duplications by disregarding repeated project topics, hence not allowing different students from different supervisors take the same project topic at a time. The frontend of this project was designed using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, while the backend was implemented using PHP and MySQL. The system was tested using demo data that simulates actual real-time process after its completion.