Performance comparison of sequential and cooperative integer programming search methodologies in solving curriculum-based university course timetabling problems (CB-UCT)

Abstract

The current study presents Integer Programming (IP) search methodology approaches for solving Curriculum-Based University Course Timetabling problem (CB-UCT) on real-life problem instances. The problem is applied in University Malaysia Sabah, Labuan International Campus Labuan (UMSLIC). This research involves implementing pure 0-1 IP and further incorporates IP into a distributed Multi-Agent System (MAS) in which a central agent coordinates various cooperative IP agents by sharing the best part of the solutions and direct the IP agents towards more promising search space and hence improve a common global list of the solutions. The objectives are to find applicable solutions and compare the performance of sequential and cooperative IP search methodology implementations for solving real-life CB-UCT in UMSLIC. The results demonstrate both sequential and parallel implementation search methodologies are able to generate and improve the solutions impressively, however, the results clearly show that cooperative search that combines the strength of integer programming outperforms the performance of a standalone counterpart in UMSLIC instances.