A survey of approaches for university course timetabling problem

Abstract

Scheduling is one of the problems which so many researches have been conducted on it over the years. The university course timetabling problem which is an NP-hard problem is a type of scheduling problem. Timetabling process must be done for each semester frequently, which is an exhausting and time consuming task. The allocation of whole of events in timeslots and rooms performs by the university course timetabling process considering the list of hard and soft constraints presented in one semester, so that no conflict is created in such allocations. In the university course timetabling problem (UCTTP), the hard constraints should not be violated under any conditions; soft constraints also should not be violated as much as possible. The aim of the present paper is to analyze available approaches in the study of university course timetabling problems, including operational researches, metaheuristic methods and intelligent novel methods; also the distributed multi agent systems based approach (Cooperative Search method) is investigated due to its scalability which enables the timetabling of common events between departments. In addition, in this work a complete introduction of reliable datasets has been given to test and evaluation of the structure of considered algorithms.