Solving university course timetabling problems using FET software

Abstract

In recent years, university course timetabling at University of Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP) given by Bahagian Pengurusan Akademik (BPA) applied based on their experience with a little guidance from Microsoft Excel to generate the timetable. The most challenges is not about the generating a timetable that works, but generating one that is fairly, practical and good as possible. In general, the university course timetabling problem is an optimization problem in which a set of events has to be scheduled in timeslots, located in suitable rooms under specific constraints. Free Educational Timetabling (FET) is FET is open source free software for automatically scheduling the timetable of a school, high-school or university. It uses a fast and efficient timetabling algorithm, developed with C language in 2002. In this paper, the process of adaptation in presented to produce university course timetable, which has been practically used starting from Semester II, 2012/2013. Due to the complexity and constraints of generating the course timetable, an experimental methodology for choosing proper parameter setting. In particularly, the procedures allow an automatic and semi-automatic configuration of the software with a good save in time. The successful example shows that the implementation of FET software can provide a new alternative on solving the university course timetable problems through an experimental methodology leads to high performing algorithms and viable solutions for hard combinatorial optimization problems in comparison to previous practices.