Article ID: | iaor20023288 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 137 |
Issue: | 3 |
Start Page Number: | 512 |
End Page Number: | 523 |
Publication Date: | Mar 2002 |
Journal: | European Journal of Operational Research |
Authors: | Crespo Enric, Alvarez-Valds Ramn, Tamarit Jos Manuel |
Keywords: | heuristics, timetabling |
Building a course timetable is a difficult and lengthy task which universities devote a large amount of human and material resources to every year. We have developed a computer package to solve this problem. The program runs on a PC and the user may set the objectives and parameters from among a wide range of possibilities. It has a user-friendly interface for the user to input the relevant data and obtain the corresponding results. The optimization process is based on a set of heuristic algorithms. The core is a Tabu Search procedure for which several strategies have been developed and tested in order to get a fast and powerful algorithm. The first tests of the package have produced satisfactory results.