ABSTRACT

UNIVERSITY COURSE SCHEDULING USING A GENETIC ALGORITHM

Ahmet Turan Yeler
M.S., Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering
Supervisor: Asst. Prof. Dr. Cuneyt F. Bazlamacci

December 2002, 83 pages

The course-scheduling problem comes up every year in educational institutions and it has been solved by human resources for a long time. It is solved either manually or with the limited help of a very simple administration system and it usually involves taking the previous year’s timetable as the starting schedule and modifying it so that it is acceptable for the new semester or year. The constraints of the problem differ from university to university and department to department. The problem is already shown to be NP-hard, hence the present study aims to solve it using an evolutionary approach, namely the genetic algorithm. Following the identification of the course scheduling constraints for the Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department in the Middle East Technical University, the genetic algorithm is designed and an integrated software is developed to automate the routine scheduling task.

Keywords: Course Scheduling, University Timetable, Evolutionary Approach, Genetic Algorithm.