Reinforced Island Model Genetic Algorithm to Solve University Course Timetabling

The University Course Timetabling Problem (UCTP) is a scheduling problem of assigning teaching event in certain time and room by considering the constraints of university stakeholders such as students, lecturers, departments, etc. This problem becomes complicated for universities which have immense number of students and lecturers. Therefore, a scalable and reliable timetabling solver is needed. However, current solvers and generic solution failed to meet several specific UCTP. Moreover, some universities implement student sectioning problem with individual student specific constraints. This research introduces the Reinforced Asynchronous Island Model Genetic Algorithm (RIMGA) to optimize the resource usage of the computer. RIMGA will configure the slave that has completed its process to helping other machines that have yet to complete theirs. This research shows that RIMGA not only improves time performance in the computational execution process, it also oers greater opportunity to escape the local optimum trap than previous model

Hybrid artificial intelligence technique for solving large, highly constrained timetabling problems

Timetabling problems are often hard and time-consuming to solve. Profits from full automatization of this process can be invaluable. Although over the years many solutions have been proposed, most of the methods concern only one problem instance or class. This paper describes a possibly universal method for solving large, highly constrained timetabling problems from different areas. The solution is based on evolutionary algorithm's framework, with specialized genetic operators and penalty-based evaluation function, and uses hyper-heuristics to establish its operating parameters. The method has been used to solve three different timetabling problems, which are described in detail, along with some results of preliminary experiments

Term-End Exam Scheduling at United States Military Academy/West Point

Scheduling term-end exams (TEE) at the United States Military Academy in West Point is unlike any other exam timetabling problem we know of. Exam timetabling normally produces a conflict-free timetable covering a reasonably long exam period, where every exam is scheduled exactly once for all the students enrolled in the corresponding class. The situation is quite different at West Point. There are hundreds of exams to schedule over such a short time period that there is simply no feasible solution. The challenge is then to allow something that is not even considered elsewhere, that is, creating multiple sessions of some exams, scheduled at different times within the exam period, to allow each student to take all exams he/she must take. The overall objective is to find a feasible exam schedule with a minimum number of such duplicate exams. The paper describes a system that has been developed at GAMS Development Corp. in close cooperation with the scheduling staff at West Point, and that has been used successfully since 2001. It uses mathematical optimization in several modules, and some of the techniques proposed are new. It is fast and flexible, and allows for human interaction, such as adding initially unexpected constraints, coming for instance from instructors’ preferences and dislikes, as well as their hierarchical rankings. It is robust and can be used by people familiar with the organization at West Point, without the need for them to be technically-trained. Overall, using the course and student information databases, it is an effective decision support system that calls optimization tools in an unobtrusive way

Diseño e implementación de un algoritmo para dar solución al problema de asignación de salones (Timetabling) usando el método de colonia de hormigas

En muy corto tiempo el software es posiblemente uno de los productos de la Ingeniería que más se ha transformado, evolucionando desde el software empírico, hasta llegar al desarrollo de aplicaciones bajo los principios y herramientas de la Ingeniería del software, aun así, cuando se ha tratado de mantener en regla dichos principios, aquellos encargados de su elaboración se han visto obligados a enfrentar una serie de problemas muy comunes gracias a la gran exigencia en la capacidad de resultados de los programas y a diferentes requerimientos que con el pasar del tiempo se vuelven aun más grandes debido al cambio de las condiciones de uso, instalación, plataformas, tiempos, hardware, etc. lo que aumenta su complejidad y con el transcurso de los días su obsolescencia. Gracias al rápido avance tecnológico de la información, la cantidad y la complejidad del software se ha acrecentado de una forma considerable, así como también han aumentado los requerimientos en su funcionalidad, confiabilidad y por lo tanto su seguridad, intentando con esto reconocer requisitos incompletos, ambiguos o contradictorios; de esta manera la calidad y la productividad se están transformando en las mayores preocupaciones para los desarrolladores del software. Uno de los problemas en los que la computación de alto desempeño puede mejorar los tiempos de ejecución así como también la forma de implementar un algoritmo determinado es la programación de clases con aulas y horarios adecuados a las necesidades de una institución educativa; problema al que se llamara de ahora en adelante Asignación de Aulas y Horarios, el cual se intentará resolver usando Colonia de Hormigas como metodología heurística para la búsqueda de soluciones. La Asignación de Aulas y Horarios consiste en relacionar un grupo de profesores a un grupo de materias dentro de un período de tiempo fijo, generalmente una semana, satisfaciendo un grupo de restricciones de diferente tipo; encontrar una solución de forma

MetroNG: Computer-Aided Scheduling and Collision Detection

In this paper, we propose a formal model of the objects involved in a class of scheduling problems, namely in the classroom scheduling in universities which allow a certain degree of liberty in their curricula. Using the formal model, we present efficient algorithms for the detection of collisions of the involved objects and for the inference of a tree-like navigational structure in an interactive scheduling software allowing a selection of the most descriptive view of the scheduling objects. These algorithms were used in a real-world application called MetroNG; a visual interactive tool that is based on more than 10 years of experience we have in the field. It is currently used by the largest universities and colleges in the Czech Republic. The efficiency and usability of MetroNG suggests that our approach may be applied in many areas where multi-dimensionally structured data are presented in an interactive application

Curriculum-based course timetabling with student flow, soft constraints, and smoothing objectives: an application to a real case study

This paper deals with curriculum-based course timetabling. In particular, we describe the results of a real application at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata.” In this regard, we developed a multi-objective mixed-integer model which attempts to optimize (i) the flow produced by the students enrolled in the lectures, (ii) soft conflicts produced by the possible overlap among compulsory and non-compulsory courses, and (iii) the number of lecture hours per curriculum within the weekdays. The model has been implemented and solved by means of a commercial solver and experiments show that the model is able to provide satisfactory solutions as compared with the real scenario under consideration