scholarly journals Effective Solution of University Course Timetabling using Particle Swarm Optimizer based Hyper Heuristic approach

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (4(Suppl.)) ◽  
pp. 1465
Author(s):  
Zahid Iqbal ◽  
Rafia Ilyas ◽  
Huah Yong Chan ◽  
Naveed Ahmed

The university course timetable problem (UCTP) is typically a combinatorial optimization problem. Manually achieving a useful timetable requires many days of effort, and the results are still unsatisfactory. unsatisfactory. Various states of art methods (heuristic, meta-heuristic) are used to satisfactorily solve UCTP. However, these approaches typically represent the instance-specific solutions. The hyper-heuristic framework adequately addresses this complex problem. This research proposed Particle Swarm Optimizer-based Hyper Heuristic (HH PSO) to solve UCTP efficiently. PSO is used as a higher-level method that selects low-level heuristics (LLH) sequence which further generates an optimal solution. The proposed approach generates solutions into two phases (initial and improvement). A new LLH named “least possible rooms left” has been developed and proposed to schedule events. Both datasets of international timetabling competition (ITC) i.e., ITC 2002 and ITC 2007 are used to evaluate the proposed method. Experimental results indicate that the proposed low-level heuristic helps to schedule events at the initial stage. When compared with other LLH’s, the proposed LLH schedule more events for 14 and 15 data instances out of 24 and 20 data instances of ITC 2002 and ITC 2007, respectively. The experimental study shows that HH PSO gets a lower soft constraint violation rate on seven and six data instances of ITC 2007 and ITC 2002, respectively. This research has concluded the proposed LLH can get a feasible solution if prioritized.

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 6410-6417
Author(s):  
H. Alghamdi ◽  
T. Alsubait ◽  
H. Alhakami ◽  
A. Baz

The university course timetabling problem looks for the best schedule, to satisfy given criteria as a set of given resources, which may contain lecturers, groups of students, classrooms, or laboratories. Developing a timetable is a fundamental requirement for the healthy functioning of all educational and administrative parts of an academic institution. However, factors such as the availability of hours, the number of subjects, and the allocation of teachers make the timetable problem very complex. This study intends to review several optimization algorithms that could be applied as possible solutions for the university student course timetable problem. The reviewed algorithms take into account the demands of institutional constraints for course timetable management.


2015 ◽  
pp. 1246-1276
Author(s):  
Wen Fung Leong ◽  
Yali Wu ◽  
Gary G. Yen

Generally, constraint-handling techniques are designed for evolutionary algorithms to solve Constrained Multiobjective Optimization Problems (CMOPs). Most Multiojective Particle Swarm Optimization (MOPSO) designs adopt these existing constraint-handling techniques to deal with CMOPs. In this chapter, the authors present a constrained MOPSO in which the information related to particles' infeasibility and feasibility status is utilized effectively to guide the particles to search for feasible solutions and to improve the quality of the optimal solution found. The updating of personal best archive is based on the particles' Pareto ranks and their constraint violations. The infeasible global best archive is adopted to store infeasible nondominated solutions. The acceleration constants are adjusted depending on the personal bests' and selected global bests' infeasibility and feasibility statuses. The personal bests' feasibility statuses are integrated to estimate the mutation rate in the mutation procedure. The simulation results indicate that the proposed constrained MOPSO is highly competitive in solving selected benchmark problems.


2020 ◽  
Vol 77 ◽  
pp. 01001
Author(s):  
Alfian Akbar Gozali ◽  
Shigeru Fujimura

The University Course Timetabling Problem (UCTP) is a scheduling problem of assigning teaching event in certain time and room by considering the constraints of university stakeholders such as students, lecturers, and departments. The constraints could be hard (encouraged to be satisfied) or soft (better to be fulfilled). This problem becomes complicated for universities which have an immense number of students and lecturers. Moreover, several universities are implementing student sectioning which is a problem of assigning students to classes of a subject while respecting individual student requests along with additional constraints. Such implementation enables students to choose a set of preference classes first then the system will create a timetable depend on their preferences. Subsequently, student sectioning significantly increases the problem complexity. As a result, the number of search spaces grows hugely multiplied by the expansion of students, other variables, and involvement of their constraints. However, current and generic solvers failed to meet scalability requirement for student sectioning UCTP. In this paper, we introduce the Multi-Depth Genetic Algorithm (MDGA) to solve student sectioning UCTP. MDGA uses the multiple stages of GA computation including multi-level mutation and multi-depth constraint consideration. Our research shows that MDGA could produce a feasible timetable for student sectioning problem and get better results than previous works and current UCTP solver. Furthermore, our experiment also shows that MDGA could compete with other UCTP solvers albeit not the best one for the ITC-2007 benchmark dataset.


Mathematics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shu-Kai S. Fan ◽  
Chih-Hung Jen

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a population-based optimization technique that has been applied extensively to a wide range of engineering problems. This paper proposes a variation of the original PSO algorithm for unconstrained optimization, dubbed the enhanced partial search particle swarm optimizer (EPS-PSO), using the idea of cooperative multiple swarms in an attempt to improve the convergence and efficiency of the original PSO algorithm. The cooperative searching strategy is particularly devised to prevent the particles from being trapped into the local optimal solutions and tries to locate the global optimal solution efficiently. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified through the simulation study where the EPS-PSO algorithm is compared to a variety of exiting “cooperative” PSO algorithms in terms of noted benchmark functions.


Author(s):  
L. H. Campbell

AbstractThe problem of planning the annual intakes to a university course, in which there are capacity constraints on the total enrolment, so as to produce a steady transition into an eventual no-growth situation is formulated as a linear program. The special structure of the problem is exploited to find a particular, optimal solution and to show that the addition of integrality constraints on the intakes poses no additional difficulty. The usefulness of the proposed methods is illustrated with an example from the University of Adelaide.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document