A heuristic-based technique for university resource allocation problems

Most academic institutions face the problem of scheduling both courses and examinations in every year. As the difficulty of the problem increases, due to a large number of students, courses, exams, rooms and invigilator constraints, an automated resource allocation system that can produce feasible and high quality timetables is often required. To provide a good university planning, a fast and efficient solver is required. Various techniques are proposed to solve the timetabling problem, since course planning is a combinatorial optimization problem, we apply a heuristic based approach to solve it. In this paper we propose a solver based on using an efficient heuristic for planning: tabu search. We show how all hard and soft constraints are taken into account to solve some real life benchmarks. We conclude the paper by presenting some issues to improve the proposed algorithm and discussing their the possibility for hybridizing with other powerful heuristics.