Assigning students to course sections using tabu search

In this paper we describe a new student registration system which has been developed at the University of Valencia, Spain. The system has two steps. First, the students make a computer-aided course selection from the courses available at the University. Thereafter, an assignment procedure allocates students to sections in order to respect two criteria: to provide the students with satisfactory schedules and to get balanced section enrollments. The assignment process has two phases. In Phase I, we obtain a set of the best solutions for each student. The algorithm is based on the construction of maximum cardinality independent sets. In Phase II, these solution sets are put together and a tabu search algorithm looks for a satisfactory balance between course sections without causing the solution obtained for each student to worsen significantly. The system was used at the beginning of the academic year 1996/97 in the Faculty of Mathematics and could be extended in the near future to the rest of the University.