A genetic algorithm approach to school timetabling

Abstract

An adaptive algorithm based on computational intelligence techniques is designed, developed and applied to the timetabling problem of educational organizations. The proposed genetic algorithm is used in order to create feasible and efficient timetables for high schools in Greece. In order to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed genetic algorithm, exhaustive experiments with real-world input data coming from many different high schools in the city of Patras have been conducted. As well as that, in order to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm, we compare its experimental results with the results obtained by another effective algorithm applied to the same problem. Simulation results showed that the proposed algorithm outperforms other existing attempts. However, the most significant contribution of the paper is that the proposed algorithm allows for criteria adaptation, thus producing different timetables for different constraints priorities. So, the proposed approach, due to its inherent adaptive capabilities, can be used, each time satisfying different specific constraints, in order to lead to different timetables, thus meeting the different needs that each school may have.

Keywords:

• GAs
• timetabling
• education
• computers
• artificial intelligence