Intelligent examination timetabling system using hybrid intelligent water drops algorithm

This paper proposes Hybrid Intelligent Water Drops (HIWD) algorithm to solve Tamhidi programs uncapacitated examination timetabling problem in Universiti Sains Islamic Malaysia (USIM).Intelligent Water Drops algorithm (IWD) is a population-based algorithm where each drop represents a solution and the sharing between the drops during the search lead to better drops.The results of this study prove that the proposed algorithm can produce a high quality examination timetable in shorter time in comparison with the manual timetable

Team-Teaching-Based Course Scheduling Using Genetic Algorithm

Scheduling problems occur in various fields, e.g., education, health institutions, transportation, sports, etc. Main scheduling problems in education is course scheduling which creates schedules for students and lecturers. In this study, course scheduling allocates the lecturers in the form of team teaching and courses into the class and a certain time to even out the workload of lecturers per day and a group of students per day in one week without breaking the constraint. The method used in this research is a genetic algorithm where Universitas Bhayangkara Jakarta Raya as the case study. The genetic algorithm process is done by getting several candidate solutions that undergo a process of selection, mutation, and crossing over to produce chromosomes with the best fitness values. The objective function in this research is minimizing the average variance of the workload of lecturers and students per day in one week. The parameters used in genetic algorithm are determined based on the Design of Experiments mechanism (DOE). The optimal parameter values ​​used to run the program are as: population size = 50, with probability of crossing over = 0.4 and probability of mutation = 0.008. The results of scheduling with genetic algorithms show that the value of the workload variance lecturers and students by considering team teaching is better than actual scheduling. The application of the genetic algorithm method results in a decrease in the standard value deviation of the workload of lecturers and a group of students in one week is 0.114 (3.68%) and 3.11 (55.7%). In addition, course scheduling uses a genetic algorithm with consider team teaching better than genetic algorithm without considering team teaching because there is no class schedule that clashes in real conditions

Exam timetabling using graph colouring approach

Timetabling at large covering many different types of problems which have their own unique characteristics. In education, the three most common academic timetabling problems are school timetable, university timetable and exam timetable. Exam timetable is crucial but difficult to be done manually due to the complexity of the problem. The main problem includes dual academic calendar, increasing student enrolments and limitations of resources. This study presents a solution method for exam timetable problem in centre for foundation studies and extension education (FOSEE), Multimedia University, Malaysia. The method of solution is a heuristic approach that include graph colouring, cluster heuristic and sequential heuristic

Exam Timetabling Using Graph Colouring Approach

Timetabling at large covering many different types of problems which have their own unique characteristics. In education, the three most common academic timetabling problems are school timetable, university timetable and exam timetable. Exam timetable is crucial but difficult to be done manually due to the complexity of the problem. The main problem includes dual academic calendar, increasing student enrolments and limitations of resources. This study presents a solution method for exam timetable problem in centre for foundation studies and extension education (FOSEE), Multimedia University, Malaysia. The method of solution is a heuristic approach that include graph colouring, cluster heuristic and sequential heuristic

Robustness Approaches for the Examination Timetabling Problem under Data Uncertainty

In the literature the examination timetabling problem (ETTP) is often considered a post-enrollment problem (PE-ETTP). In the real world, universities often schedule their exams before students register using information from previous terms. A direct consequence of this approach is the uncertainty present in the resulting models. In this work we discuss several approaches available in the robust optimization literature. We consider the implications of each approach in respect to the examination timetabling problem and present how the most favorable approaches can be applied to the ETTP. Afterwards we analyze the impact of some possible implementations of the given robustness approaches on two real world instances and several random instances generated by our instance generation framework which we introduce in this work.Comment: original paper: 15 pages, published at the Multidisciplinary International Scheduling Conference 2019 (MISTA 2019

A New Initialisation Method for Examination Timetabling Heuristics

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via the DOI in this record.Timetabling problems are widespread, but are particularly prevalent in the educational domain. When sufficiently large, these are often only effectively tackled by timetabling meta-heuristics. The effectiveness of these in turn are often largely dependant on their initialisation protocols. There are a number of different initialisation approaches used in the literature for starting examination timetabling heuristics. We present a new iterative initialisation algorithm here --- which attempts to generate high-quality and legal solutions, to feed into a heuristic optimiser. The proposed approach is empirically verified on the ITC 2007 and Yeditepe benchmark sets. It is compared to popular initialisation approaches commonly employed in exam timetabling heuristics: the largest degree, largest weighted degree, largest enrollment, and saturation degree graph-colouring approaches, and random schedule allocation. The effectiveness of these approaches are also compared via incorporation in an exemplar evolutionary algorithm. The results show that the proposed method is capable of producing feasible solutions for all instances, with better quality and diversity compared to the alternative methods. It also leads to improved optimiser performance.Saudi Arabia Cultural Burea

Incorporating capacitative constraint to the preference-based conference scheduling via domain transformation approach

No AbstractKeywords: conference scheduling; domain transformation approach; capacity optimizatio

Hybridizations within a graph based hyper-heuristic framework for university timetabling problems

A significant body of recent literature has explored various research directions in hyper-heuristics (which can be thought as heuristics to choose heuristics). In this paper, we extend our previous work to construct a unified graph-based hyper-heuristic (GHH) framework, under which a number of local search-based algorithms (as the high level heuristics) are studied to search upon sequences of low-level graph colouring heuristics. To gain an in-depth understanding on this new framework, we address some fundamental issues concerning neighbourhood structures and characteristics of the two search spaces (namely, the search spaces of the heuristics and the actual solutions). Furthermore, we investigate efficient hybridizations in GHH with local search methods and address issues concerning the exploration of the high-level search and the exploitation ability of the local search. These, to our knowledge, represent entirely novel directions in hyper-heuristics. The efficient hybrid GHH obtained competitive results compared with the best published results for both benchmark course and exam timetabling problems, demonstrating its efficiency and generality across different problem domains. Possible extensions upon this simple, yet general, GHH framework are also discussed