MATP: A multi-agent model for the university timetabling problem

Abstract

This paper proposes a multi-agent model for solving the university course timetabling problem. It is composed of cooperating agents enabling highly distributed processing of the problem and incorporating constraints that have not been considered by previous works. The aim of our model is to provide a best solution satisfying hard and soft constraints while reducing temporal complexity. To analyze the efficiency of our model, we give experimental results based on real instances of the Higher Business School of Tunis by analyzing the variation effect of the lecture and teacher numbers on the messages number and the CPU execution time, and the variation effect of the assignment priority score on the percentage of teacher’s preferences satisfaction.