Incorporating great deluge with kempe chain neighbourhood structure for the enrolment-based course timetabling problem

Abstract

In general, course timetabling refers to assignment processes that assign events (courses) to a given rooms and timeslots subject to a list of hard and soft constraints. It is a challenging task for the educational institutions. In this study we employed a great deluge algorithm with kempe chain neighbourhood structure as an improvement algorithm. The Round Robin (RR) algorithm is used to control the selection of neighbourhood structures within the great deluge algorithm. The performance of our approach is tested over eleven benchmark datasets (representing one large, five medium and five small problems). Experimental results show that our approach is able to generate competitive results when compared with previous available approaches. Possible extensions upon this simple approach are also discussed. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.