| Abstrakt: |
Purpose: In this paper a new two-phase method is presented for solving the curriculum based university course timetabling problem. In both phases of the new present method a new metaheuristic approach is used. Methodology: In the first phase of the new method, a feasible high quality solution is computed. To this end, at first the hard constraints relating to the time periods are considered and a solution is computed that satisfies these hard constraints. In the next step, a new method is introduced for the assignment of rooms to courses, after application of which on the solution that satisfies the time period hard constraints, a feasible solution is computed. In the second phase, at first several new neighborhood functions are used to improve the quality of computed feasible solution. While the fitness function of the first phase is based on the violation of hard constraints, the fitness function of the second phase is based on the penalty of the feasible solution. Findings: The numerical results indicate that the required computing time increases with the size of instances and the algorithm tends to converge towards the optimal solution after a few minutes. Originality/Value: The presented algorithm enables us to deal with large university course timetabling problems in practice. Moreover, it provides us with an efficient way to obtain feasible solutions to such real-world instances and try to improve their quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
