Using a fuzzy expert system as a decision support system to decrease time consumption in the UAST development process: A case study

Abstract

Always the decision of the government to the private sector is faced with the challenges and high level of importance, because these decisions should be taken at the meeting of standards and functional requirements to overcome investors' interests. These decisions include education, and due to the governance nature of education and the governments' strategies in this area, the private sectors who act in it, have been affected by the consequences of different decisions. \In this paper, our motivation is to propose a system to decide on how to develop applied academic educations at the Applied ScienceEducation Centers (ASEC's) which are supervised by the University of Applied Science and Technology (UAST) in Iran. The method used is theFuzzy Inference System (FIS) to reach this goal. The model performed in this study consists of a two-part FIS for two purposes straight ahead.The first concerns the quantitative development of higher applied education, including the number of Course Request (CR) for each ASEC with 4 inputs and 242 rules. The latter, is related to the qualitative development of higher applied education, including the assessment of the capability and competence of each ASEC for specific CR with the course and student admission background, specialty, committee's and council’s opinion, and frequency of course in city or province with 9 inputs, 350 rules, and an output. Each section has its inputs and rules that are determined and used by experts in this domain. \Our results show that using this method, provides some cost and time savings. This model analyzes in less than 2 minutes, while in practice it could be gain within 1650 person /hours work in different committees that all of them have their costs. Also, results are very close to reality with the advantage that there is no way to apply personal preferences, which largely meets the needs of research.