Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 712752, 22 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/712752
Research Article

Test-Sheet Composition Using Analytic Hierarchy Process and Hybrid Metaheuristic Algorithm TS/BBO

Hong Duan,1 Wei Zhao,1 Gaige Wang,2,3 and Xuehua Feng4

1School of Computer Science and Information Technology, Northeast Normal University, Changchun 130117, China
2Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130033, China
3Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100039, China
4School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Yili Normal University, Yining, Xinjiang 835000, China

Received 10 June 2012; Accepted 27 August 2012

Academic Editor: Jun-Juh Yan

Copyright © 2012 Hong Duan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Due to the shortcomings in the traditional methods which dissatisfy the examination requirements in composing test sheet, a new method based on tabu search (TS) and biogeography-based optimization (BBO) is proposed. Firstly, according to the requirements of the test-sheet composition such as the total score, test time, chapter score, knowledge point score, question type score, cognitive level score, difficulty degree, and discrimination degree, a multi constrained multiobjective model of test-sheet composition is constructed. Secondly, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used to work out the weights of all the test objectives, and then the multiobjective model is turned into the single objective model by the linear weighted sum. Finally, an improved biogeography-based optimization—TS/BBO is proposed to solve test-sheet composition problem. To prove the performance of TS/BBO, TS/BBO is compared with BBO and other population-based optimization methods such as ACO, DE, ES, GA, PBIL, PSO, and SGA. The experiment illustrates that the proposed approach can effectively improve composition speed and success rate.