A Student-Oriented Class-Course Timetabling Model with the Capabilities of Making Good Use of Student Time, Saving College Budgets and Sharing Departmental Resources Effectively

This paper proposes a student-oriented class-course timetabling model to make good use of student time, save college budgets, and share departmental resources effectively. To achieve these goals, the study proposes a heuristic driven process coupled with two fitness functions to satisfy students´ needs for taking or retaking certain courses without delaying their graduation; the proposed method balances class sizes to decrease the number of elective courses opened to the students; and the research formulates the allocating rules for utilizing the classrooms and the laboratories to ensure that the resources can be shared effectively. From the experimental results, the minimum and maximum average satisfaction for all students´ needs is 0.8 and 0.9, respectively, where the lowest score is 0.7 and the highest score is 1. These results show that the difference of each student´s satisfaction is small and students´ expectations on taking specific subjects can be satisfied as nearly as possible.