Generating university timetable by using a combination of heuristic and random selection

Abstract

The importance of timetable is to organize the arranged event in an organized list. The faculty or university timetable usually consists of huge data or event with a lot of constraint and characteristics that unable to change and need to be scheduled. The reliable and fast generation of timetable is demanding in generating the timetable especially if the timetable system is running in a web base. Unfortunately, there are a lot of timetable systems that unable to complete the generation in a short period of time. Here, we proposed a new combination of heuristic and random selection approach in generating the timetable with fast and reliable result. Our combination was experimented for one semester in Faculty of Electrical Engineering of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia that consists of huge number of students with parallel lectures, multidisciplinary subjects, limited rooms and also lecturer's constraint. The performance reveals that this combination able to generate the timetable for the whole faculty within only 16 seconds, thus, verifying its effectiveness and reliability.