Assessment of the Sustainability of University Academic Programs for the Accreditation: A Complex Challenge

The accreditation of university academic programs is a critical process in ensuring the quality and standards of higher education. A significant component of this process is the assignment of reference lecturers who make these academic programs sustainable. The problem of determining the appropriate faculty members to accredit university academic programs is a multifaceted challenge. The selection of reference lecturers for accreditation is influenced by various factors, including their academic positions, the subject area of their sectors according to the bachelor's or master's degree in which they are delivered, and the number of students enrolled compared to the degree classes. Moreover, the evolving nature of higher education, given its increased emphasis on interdisciplinary topics, further complicates this assessment due also to the presence of professors or researchers coming from other departments. The development of an optimization algorithm capable of simultaneously considering all the constraints of the problem is therefore needed to address these challenges and achieve to a balanced approach for a sustainable didactic offer. The optimization algorithm works by maximizing the number of lecturers available as reference lecturers for other departments and minimizing those needed from other departments and from external teaching contracts. The problem of reference lecturers does not refer to the department alone but to the entire atheneum.