An improvement heuristic for the timetabling problem

• Main Authors: GUNAWAN, Aldy, NG, Kien Ming, POH, Kim Leng
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2007
• Subjects: timetabling; mathematical programming; improvement heuristic algorithm; Programming Languages and Compilers; Theory and Algorithms
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4002; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5004/viewcontent/ae197df7f96f8a059f20ecf0c8e9abc5b061__2_.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This paper formulates a timetabling problem, which is often encountered in a university, as a mathematical programming model. The proposed model combines both teacher assignment and course scheduling problems simultaneously, which causes the entire model to become more complex. We propose an improvement heuristic algorithm to solve such a model. The proposed algorithm has been tested with several randomly generated datasets of sizes that are comparable to those occurring in a university in Indonesia. The computational results show that the improvement heuristic is not only able to obtain good solutions, but is also able to do so within reasonable computational time.