Curriculum based course timetabling

Author

Mansour, Nehad ; El-Jazzar, Hanaa

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Math., Lebanese American Univ., Beirut, Lebanon

fYear

2013

fDate

23-25 July 2013

Firstpage

787

Lastpage

792

Abstract

Scheduling courses into predefined periods and rooms over a week with a given set of constraints is an NP-complete problem. This work considers proposing three-phase heuristic algorithms that fulfils the requirements of zero hard constraints values and minimal values for soft constraints. We have run our algorithms on subject problems listed at the international timetabling competition in 2007 (ITC2007) and we have compared our results with those obtained in ITC2007. Our results show that our approach produces better results for the larger or more complex problems.

Keywords

combinatorial mathematics; computational complexity; educational courses; further education; search problems; simulated annealing; ITC2007; NP-complete problem; academic university administration; combinatorial optimization problem; course scheduling; curriculum based course timetabling; international timetabling competition; scatter search algorithm; simulated annealing; soft constraint minimal values; three-phase heuristic algorithms; university course timetabling; zero hard constraint values; Availability; Educational institutions; Linear programming; Schedules; Simulated annealing; Time factors; Tuning; ITC2007; Metaheuristics; course timetabling; scatter search algorithm; simulated annealing; timetabling;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Natural Computation (ICNC), 2013 Ninth International Conference on

Conference_Location

Shenyang

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICNC.2013.6818082

Filename

6818082