Meta-heuristic approaches for the University course timetabling problem
Course timetabling is an ongoing challenge that universities face all around the world. This combinatorial optimization task involves allocating a set of events into finite time slots and rooms while attempting to satisfy a set of predefined constraints. Given the high number of constraints and the...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English English |
| Published: |
Elsevier
2023
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://eprints.ums.edu.my/id/eprint/38208/1/ABSTRACT.pdf https://eprints.ums.edu.my/id/eprint/38208/2/FULL%20TEXT.pdf |
| Summary: | Course timetabling is an ongoing challenge that universities face all around the world. This combinatorial optimization task involves allocating a set of events into finite time slots and rooms while attempting to satisfy a set of predefined constraints. Given the high number of constraints and the large solution space to be explored, the University Course Timetabling Problem (UCTP) is classified as an NP-hard problem. Meta-heuristic approaches have been commonly applied to this problem in the literature and have achieved high performance on benchmark datasets. This survey paper provides a comprehensive and systematic review of these approaches in the UCTP. It reviews, summarizes, and categorizes the approaches, and introduces a classification for hybrid meta-heuristic methods. Furthermore, it critically analyzes the benefits and limitations of the methods. It also presents challenges, gaps, and possible future work. |
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