AUTOMATED LECTURE TIMETABLING USING A MEMETIC ALGORITHM

The lecture timetabling problem is known to be a highly constrained combinatorial optimization problem. There have been many attempts to address this problem using integer programming, graph coloring and several heuristic search methods. However, since each university has its own timetable setting requirements, it is difficult to develop a general solution method. Thus, the work is generally done manually. This paper attempts to solve the lecture timetabling problem of the University of Asmara using a customized memetic algorithm that we have called ALTUMA. It is a hybrid of genetic algorithms with hill-climbing operators. The performance of ALTUMA was evaluated using data obtained from the University. Empirical results show that ALTUMA is capable of producing good results in a reasonable amount of time. Besides, the results demonstrate that incorporating local search operators with a probabilistic scheme and delta method of fitness evaluation into the memetic algorithm significantly improves the search capabilities of the algorithm.Lecture timetabling, memetic algorithm, hill-climbing operators

Memetic Algorithms for Business Analytics and Data Science: A Brief Survey

This chapter reviews applications of Memetic Algorithms in the areas of business analytics and data science. This approach originates from the need to address optimization problems that involve combinatorial search processes. Some of these problems were from the area of operations research, management science, artificial intelligence and machine learning. The methodology has developed considerably since its beginnings and now is being applied to a large number of problem domains. This work gives a historical timeline of events to explain the current developments and, as a survey, gives emphasis to the large number of applications in business and consumer analytics that were published between January 2014 and May 2018