A harmony search with multi-pitch adjusting rate for the university course Timetabling

Abstract

Course timetabling is a challenging administrative task for the educational institutions which have to painstakingly repeat the process several times per year. In general, course timetabling refers to the process of assigning given events to the given rooms and timeslots by taking into consideration the given hard and soft constraints. To tackle a highly-constraint timetabling problem, a powerful and robust algorithm that can deal with multidimensional gateways is required. Recently, the harmony search algorithm has been successfully tailored for the university course timetabling problem. In this chapter, the application of harmony search for the course timetabling is further enhanced by dividing the pitch adjustment operator to eight procedures, each of which is controlled by its PAR value range. Each pitch adjustment procedure is responsible for a particular local change in the new harmony. Furthermore, the acceptance rule for each pitch adjustment procedure is changed to accept the adjustment that leads to a better or equal objective function. Standard benchmarks are used to evaluate the proposed method. The results show that the proposed harmony search is capable of providing high-quality solutions compared to those in the previous works. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.