A New Approach of Design for the Academic Timetabling Problem through Genetic Algorithms

The Academic timetabling problem is a common and hard problem inside every educative institution, this problem tries to coordinate Students, Teachers, Classrooms and Timeslots under certain constrains that dependent in many cases the policies of each educational institution. The Genetic Algorithm is a popular methodology used to find solutions in problems with a huge search space, this algorithm have been proved in wide range of discrete problems with encouraging results. This paper present a GA based method that solves the Academic Timetabling Design Problem using the API-Carpio Methodology. This GA uses a variable-length representation, which involves the complete encoding of a solution that is directly applicable to real world. this solution is achieved using several real instances of academic timetabling problem from Leon Institute of Technology (LIT) producing encouraging results for all the instances. Finally we analyze the quality of our solutions against the human expert and inside the context of a real academic timetabling process.