Construction of Course Timetables Based on Great Deluge and Tabu Search

The course timetabling problem deals with the assignment of a set of courses to specific timeslots and rooms within a working week subject to a variety of hard and soft constraints. Solutions are called feasible if all the hard constraints are satisfied. The goal is to satisfy as many of the soft constraints as possible whilst constructing a feasible schedule. In this paper, we present a combination of two metaheuristics i.e. great deluge and tabu search approaches. The algorithm is tested over eleven benchmark datasets (representing one large, five medium and five small problems). The results demonstrate that our approach is able to produce solutions that have lower penalty on all the small and medium problems when compared against other techniques from the literature.

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