Student timetabling genetic algorithm accounting for student preferences

Abstract

Universities face a constant challenge when distributing students and allocating them to their required classes, especially for a large mass of students. Generating feasible timetables is a strenuous task that requires plenty of resources, which makes it impractical to take student preferences into consideration during the process. Timetabling and scheduling problems are proven to be NP-hard due to their complex nature and large search spaces. A genetic algorithm (GA) that assigns students to their classes based on their preferences is proposed as a solution to this problem and is implemented in this article. The GA’s performance is enhanced by applying different metaheuristic concepts and by tailoring the genetic operators to the given problem. The quality of the solutions generated is boosted further with the unique repair and improvement functions that were implemented in conjunction with the genetic algorithm. The success of the GA was evaluated by using different datasets of varying complexity and by assessing the quality of the solutions generated. The results obtained were promising and the algorithm guarantees the feasibility of solutions as well as satisfying more than 90% of student preferences even for the most complex problems.