Timetabling: A State-of-the-Art Evolutionary Approach

Abstract

—Timetabling is the task of creating a schedule while satisfying some constraints. This problem is an NP-Complete problem, so solving it needs some heuristics. There are many types of timetabling; we mainly focused on university course timetabling. There have been many efforts in literature, but most of them have used some limiting assumptions that cause their approach to be unusable in real situations. We've used an evolutionary approach based on genetic algorithm to solve this problem in real situation and in a reasonable amount of time. We've used real data from our department in the university and our approach could solve the problem in about 15 minutes, while manually timetabling may take three days.