Best-Worst Ant Colony System Parameter Investigation by Using Experimental Design and Analysis for Course Timetabling Problem

Author

Lutuksin, Thatchai ; Pongcharoen, Pupong

Author_Institution

Dept. of Ind. Eng., Naresuan Univ., Pitsanulok, Thailand

fYear

2010

fDate

23-25 April 2010

Firstpage

467

Lastpage

471

Abstract

Course timetabling usually arises every academic year and is solved by academic staff with/without course timetabling tool. The desirable timetable must be satisfied by hard constraints whilst soft constraints are not absolutely essential. Course timetabling is known to be NP-hard problem, which means that the computational time required to find the solution increases exponentially with problem size. Automated timetabling system has been developed for university courses scheduling. In this work, new variant of Ant Colony Optimisation called Best-Worst Ant Colony System (BWACS) was applied to solve university course timetabling problem. Advance statistical tools for experimental design and analysis were used to investigate and analyse the factor influence of this system and conclude the appropriate parameter setting of BWACS.

Keywords

computational complexity; cooperative systems; educational courses; educational institutions; optimisation; NP hard problem; ant colony optimisation; best worst ant colony system; course timetabling problem; soft constraints; university courses scheduling; Ant colony optimization; Competitive intelligence; Computer networks; Design engineering; Design for experiments; Industrial engineering; Job shop scheduling; NP-hard problem; Optimization methods; Processor scheduling; Best-Worst Ant Colony System; Computational Intelligence; Course Timetabling; Experimental Design and Analysis;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computer and Network Technology (ICCNT), 2010 Second International Conference on

Conference_Location

Bangkok

Print_ISBN

978-0-7695-4042-9

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4244-6962-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICCNT.2010.24

Filename

5474453