A Simulated Annealing for Tahmidi Course Timetabling

Scheduling university timetabling for large numbers of students is a difficult task especially to ensure no overlapping. Most of timetables are prepared manually, or at best with the help of a spreadsheet program. However, a manual process requires numbers of verification by domain experts (for example lecturers, supervisors) before it can be approved. In this research, we focus on a solution to the university timetabling problem. We will consider various soft and hard constraints of time tabling parameters such as a number of subjects ("subject"), a number of lecture or tutorial sessions ("time slots"), a number of classrooms ("sessions"), number of teachers ("teacher"), number of students ("student") and number of workloads ("workload"). We use methods based on simulated annealing to obtain optimal and sub-optimal solutions to scheduling problems. We will illustrate our work on timetabling issues of Tamhidi Programme at Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia as our case study. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.