Authors:
Nicholas A. Nechval
1
;
Gundars Berzins
1
;
Vadims Danovics
1
and
Konstantin N. Nechval
2
Affiliations:
1
University of Latvia, Latvia
;
2
Transport and Telecommunication Institute, Latvia
Keyword(s):
Education Process, Performance Index, Optimization, Dual Control, Dynamic Programming.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Computer-Supported Education
;
Domain Applications and Case Studies
;
Intelligent Learning and Teaching Systems
Abstract:
In this paper, examples arising from a problem in education process control are considered. The provision of
the number of information items in a specified discipline for education to optimize a suitable performance
index is treated as a “dual control” process. According to the theory of dual control, the control signal has
two purposes which might be in conflict with each other: 1) to help learn about any unknown parameters
and/or state of the system (estimation); 2) to contro1. In view of this, one can see that the open-loop
feedback control is, from the estimation point of view, passive, since it does not take into account that
learning is possible in the future. In contrast to this, a dual control is active, not only for the control purpose
but also for the estimation purpose because the performance depends also on the “quality” of the estimates.
Therefore, the dua1 control can be called actively adaptive since it regulates the speed and amount of
learning as required by the perf
ormance index. To determine the sequence of optimal decisions, dynamic
programming is used. It will be noted that the optimal policy can be compared with the non-optimal policy
of optimizing stage by stage. To illustrate a new technique for education process optimization via the dual
control approach, numerical examples are given.
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