| On 2003-07-29 at 15:30:00 (Brussels Time) |
Abstract
The timetabling problem consists in scheduling a sequence of lectures between teachers and students in a prefixed period of time (typically a week), satisfying a set of constraints of various types. This problem, that has been traditionally considered in the operational research field, has recently been tackled with techniques belonging also to Artificial Intelligence and Operational Research (e.g. tabu search, genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, ILP). We have developed a course scheduling system in order to solve it. The program is write in java language and the user may set the objectives and parameters from among a wide range of possibilities. The optimization process is based on a set of heuristic algorithm. The core is a tabu search procedure for which several strategies have been developed and tested in order to get a fast and powerful algorithm.
Keywords
timetabling, course scheduling, optimization
