A Simulated Annealing for Tahmidi Course Timetabling

• Published in: Procedia technology Vol. 11; pp. 437 - 445
• Main Authors: Basir, Nurlida, Ismail, Waidah, Norwawi, Norita Md
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 2013
• Subjects: fitness function; hard-constraint; scheduling; simulated annealing; soft-constraint; timetabling; scheduling; soft-constraint; simulated annealing; hard-constraint; timetabling; fitness function
• ISSN: 2212-0173; 2212-0173
• DOI: 10.1016/j.protcy.2013.12.213

Scheduling university timetabling for large numbers of students is a difficult task especially to ensure no overlapping. Most of timetables are prepared manually, or at best with the help of a spreadsheet program. However, a manual process requires numbers of verification by domain experts (for example lecturers, supervisors) before it can be approved. In this research, we focus on a solution to the university timetabling problem. We will consider various soft and hard constraints of time tabling parameters such as a number of subjects (“subject”), a number of lecture or tutorial sessions (“time slots”), a number of classrooms (“sessions”), number of teachers (“teacher”), number of students (“student”) and number of workloads (“workload”). We use methods based on simulated annealing to obtain optimal and sub-optimal solutions to scheduling problems. We will illustrate our work on timetabling issues of Tamhidi Programme at Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia as our case study.