A hybrid algorithm for the university course timetabling problem

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a new mathematical programming model that combines teacher assignment and course scheduling problems simultaneously. Due to the limitation of a mathematical programming approach to solve large problem instances, we propose a hybrid algorithm that combines two well known metaheuristics, Simulated Annealing (SA) and Tabu Search (TS). In the proposed algorithm, useful features of each metaheuristic are exploited to obtain better solutions. Several randomly generated problem instances are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The computational results illustrate the ability of the hybrid algorithm to provide good quality solutions to the problem instances within reasonable computation time.