Solving a multiobjective professional timetabling problem using evolutionary algorithms at Mandarine Academy

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper, we propose a method for solving a real‐world timetabling problem at Mandarine Academy. The primary motivation for this work is to provide an automated professional course scheduling tool to replace the time‐consuming task of manually creating timetables that are constantly incorrect. Following a review of both scientific literature and company requirements, a mathematical model of the problem is provided, which includes 18 constraints (hard/soft) and five objectives, two of which are competing. We test a handful of multi‐objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEA's) starting with the non‐dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA II and NSGA III), the multi‐objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D), the indicator‐based evolutionary algorithm and finally the strength Pareto evolutionary algorithm . Two custom genetic operators (mutation and crossover) are proposed and compared to conventional operators (PMX and swap mutation). To obtain elite configurations, a tuning phase involving all of the aforementioned algorithms is carried out. Experiments were divided by problem size, with three to five objectives tested. Experiments include the use of real‐world data from the company's catalog. This dataset was made available to the scientific community to serve as a testing ground for professional course scheduling, an underexploited field of scheduling. We discuss findings, including a comparison of each algorithm's performance using various metrics, as well as convergence graphs and population evolution.