A Simulated Annealing Heuristic for Tanzania High Schools Timetabling Problem
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Date
2011
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Global Journal of Computer Applications and Technology
Abstract
High School Course Timetabling Problem involves scheduling of lessons and teachers to timeslots within a week while satisfying a set of constraints. Like many other variants of timetabling problems, it is known to be NP- Hard, and therefore no optimal solution procedure is known to solve the problem in a reasonable time scale. Currently, very little work has been done in automating the high schools timetabling in Tanzania. Given the growing needs for educational resources in the country, optimization techniques for these resources cannot be avoided. In this paper, we present a heuristic algorithm based on Simulated Annealing. The algorithm has been tested with success on real data obtained from three high schools. A thorough experimentation has been done on six of cooling schedules. The results compare well with the previous work on the same data set and perform much better than manual system.
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Keywords
School Timetabling Problems, Combinatorial Optimization, Simulated Annealing, Cooling Schedules