A Study of the Practical and Tutorial Scheduling Problem

The practical and tutorial allocation problem is a problem encountered at tertiary institutions and essentially involves the allocation of students to practical or tutorial groups for the different courses the student is enrolled in. Practical and tutorial scheduling for first year courses is becoming mor e and more challenging as the number of permissible course combinations and student numbers inc rease at tertiary institutions, and while this has previously been done manually and independently for each course, this is no longer feasible. The paper firstly presents a formal definition of the practical and tutorial scheduling problem. Low - level c onstruction heuristics for this domain are defined and a heuristic approach for solving this problem is proposed. A tool namely, PRATS, incorporating this approach is described. The performance of PRATS on six sets of real - world data is discussed . The paper also reports on a hyper - heuristic implemented to automatically generate low - level construction heuristics and compares the performance of the generated heuristi cs to the human intuitive heuristics used.