A Max-Min Ant System for Research Topic Selction in Academia

Abstract

University professors all over the world are facing an increasing challenges to publish more and more high-quality papers, get funds, and improve their citation indices. In many scientific disciplines, like engineering and computer science, research topics keep changing and professors’ research agendas need to change as well. In this paper, we develop a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) to model a university professor problem of selecting research topics. The problem aims to increase the professor’s number of citations subject to time constraint and publication probability constraint. We also solve the suggested MILP using a max-min ant system. A case study for a professor in an industrial engineering department is also presented.