Modeling and Scheduling University Course Timetabling Problems

This paper considers the problem of university course timetabling. In this problem, there are a set of courses, lecturers and classrooms. The objective is to assign schedule courses so as to maximize the total preference of lecturer-course, lecturer-day and course-day. The paper first formulates the problem in form of linear integer programming model. Using the model and commercial software, the small sized instances are optimally solved. Then, the paper proposes three different algorithms based on imperialist competitive algorithm, simulated annealing and variable neighborhood search. The algorithms employ several novel procedures such as encoding scheme, move operator, crossing operators. The algorithms are tuned and evaluated with optimal solutions found by the model. Then, they are evaluated by comparing their performance. The results show that imperialist competitive algorithm outperforms the other algorithms.