An arbitrary heuristic room matching algorithm in obtaining an enhanced initial seed for the university course timetabling problem

Abstract

The curriculum-based course timetabling problem is a subset of the university course timetabling problem which is often regarded as both an NP-hard and NP-complete problem. The nature of the problem concerns with the assignment of lecturers-courses to available teaching space in an academic institution. The curriculum-based course timetabling problem confronts the problem of a multi-dimensional search space and matrices of high conflict-density, thus impeding the task to search for an improved solution. In this paper, the authors propose an arbitrary heuristic room matching algorithm which attempts to improve the initial seed of the curriculum-based course timetabling problem. The objective is to provide a reasonably advantageous search point to perform any subsequent improvement phase and the results obtained indicate that the proposed matching algorithm is able to provide very promising results as the fitness score of the solution is significantly enhanced within a short period of time.