Solving effectively the school timetabling problem using particle swarm optimization

Abstract

A new adaptive algorithm based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) is designed, developed and applied to the high school timetabling problem. The proposed PSO algorithm is used in order to create feasible and very efficient timetables for high schools in Greece. Experiments with real-world data coming from many different high schools have been conducted in order to show the efficiency of the proposed PSO algorithm. As well as that, the algorithm has been compared with four other effective techniques found in the literature in order to demonstrate its efficiency and superior performance. The proposed PSO algorithm outperforms, in most cases, other existing attempts to solve the same problem as shown by experimental results.