Development of multi-objective simulated annealing based decision support system for course timetabling with consideration preferences of teachers and students

Abstract

Course timetabling problem is a weekly assignment a set of course and teacher to the time and space with considering a lot of hard and soft constraints in universities. In each semester, heads of educational institutes take too much time and effort to prepare a timetable by using trial and error method or last semester's timetable, although the rapid changing needs, resources and rules of each semester causes this method are not the perfect solutions. In this study, we design and develop a novel multi objective mathematical model which taking into account the preferences of students and teachers, Due to the complexity, we have benefited the metaheuristic algorithm to solve nonlinear model. Simulated Annealing algorithm is used to solve the mathematical model in two stages. In the first stage, the system automatically generates feasible solutions that will meet all the hard constraints. Then, the solutions are improved with spotting different neighborhood's structures. This collection is in the form of computer software application which is implemented the C# language programing and SQL database. This system is tested the data gathered by Azad University data and the results compared to the manual process showed the great progress is achieved. The entire system is flexible and easy to test different scenarios

Keywords

• course timetabling
• multi-objective simulated annealing
• preferences' function
• decision support system