Hybrid harmony search with great deluge for UUM CAS curriculum based course timetabling

• Main Authors: Wahid, Juliana, Mohd Hussin, Naimah
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka 2017
• Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
• Online Access: http://repo.uum.edu.my/21732/1/JTECE%209%201-2%202017%2033%2038.pdf; http://repo.uum.edu.my/21732/; http://journal.utem.edu.my/index.php/jtec/article/view/1647
• Institution: Universiti Utara Malaysia

Producing university course timetabling is a tough and complicated task due to higher number of courses and constraints.The process usually consisted of satisfying a set of hard constraints so as a feasible solution can be obtained.It then continues with the process of optimizing (minimizing) the soft constraints in order to produce a good quality timetable. In this paper, a hybridization of harmony search with a great deluge is proposed to optimize the soft constraints.Harmony search comprised of two main operators such as memory consideration and random consideration operator.The great deluge was applied on the random consideration operator. The proposed approach was also adapted on curriculum-based course timetabling problems of College of Arts and Sciences, Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM CAS).The result shows that the quality of timetable of UUM CAS produced by the proposed approach is superior than the quality of timetable produced using the current software package.