A NEW MATHEMATICAL MODEL AND RANDOM KEY BASED METAHEURISTIC SOLUTION APPROACH FOR COURSE-ROOM-TIME ASSIGNMENT PROBLEM

Abstract

This study presents a newly developed mixed-integer mathematical model for university course-room-time assignment problem. Optimal results with no soft constraint violations are obtained for some type of problem instances. As problem complexity increases it becomes more difficult to find feasible solution for this problem in a reasonable time. Therefore, a heuristic approach is often needed for such problems. In this study, a random key based genetic algorithm (RKGA) is developed. RKGA encoding is used in order to encode the chromosomes with a length of just the number of courses and not to use problem specific genetic operators and/or repair mechanisms. Well-known problem instances from the literature are selected to evaluate the outcome. The performance of RKGA is competitive to that of other algorithms especially for big size problems.

Keywords

• course-room-time assignment problem
• mathematical modelling
• random key based genetic algorithms