The problem of university course scheduling is a complicated job to do because of the many constraints that must be considered, such as the number of courses, the number of rooms available, the number of students, lecturer preferences, and time slots. The more courses that will be scheduled, the scheduling problem becomes more complex to solve. Therefore, it is necessary to set an automatic course schedule based on optimization method. The aim of this research is to gain an optimal solution in the form of schedule in order to decrease the number of clashed courses, optimize room utilization and consider the preferences of lecturer-course. In this research, a hybridization method of Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Pattern Search (PS) is investigated for solving university course scheduling problems. The main algorithm is GA to find the global optimum solution, while the PS algorithm is used to find the local optimum solution that is difficult to obtain by the GA method. The simulation results with 93 courses show that the Hybrid GA-PS method works better than does the GA method without hybrid, as evidenced by the better fitness value of the hybrid GA-PS method which is -3528.62 and 99.24% of the solutions achieved. While the GA method without hybrid is only able to reach a solution of around 65% and has an average fitness value of -3100.76.
Comparison of Genetic Algorithm with Particle Swarm Optimisation, Ant Colony Optimisation and Tabu Search based on University Course Scheduling System
