An Intelligent Technique for Solving Timetable Problem

Authors

Abdalla El-Dhshan
PhD Candidate in Operations Research, faculty of graduate studies for statistical research, Cairo University, Egypt.

Hegazy Zaher
Professor Doctor in Mathematical statistics, faculty of graduate studies for statistical research, Cairo University, Egypt.

Naglaa Ragaa
Associate Professor in Operations Research, faculty of graduate studies for statistical research, Cairo University, Egypt.

Abstract

Timetabling problem is complex combinatorial resources allocation problems. There are two hard and soft constraints to be satisfied. The timetable is feasible if all hard constraints are satisfied. Besides, satisfying more of the soft constraints produces a high-quality timetable. Crow Search Algorithm (CSA) as an intelligence technique presents for solving timetable problem. CSA like all meta-heuristic optimization techniques is a nature-inspire of intelligent behavior of crows. The proposed CSA tested using the well-known benchmark of hard timetabling datasets (hdtt). Taguchi’s method used to tune the best parameter combinations for the factors and levels. The tuned parameters of CSA are applied on datasets in separate experiment. The results show that the proposed CSA is superior to generate solutions in reasonable CPU time when compared with other literature techniques.