A Genetic Algorithm (GA) Shell for Iterative Timetabling

We present a new approach to timetabling which is a typical Constraints Satisfaction Problem. The new approach is based on an iterative scheduling model equipped with a generic Genetic Algorithm (GA) search engine. The iterative model is the model that practitioners used to schedule school time tables. Generality of the GA engine is achieved by dynamic chromosome encoding, generic constraint data structure and robust GA operators. The implemented system has been tested on two university timetabling problems. The first one is a departmental timetable with hypothetical schedule requirements. The second one is also a departmental timetable which is specified in a previous research. Timetables generated in the second experiment are comparable to previous work using parallel machines. Performance is satisfactory, although performance data was not available in previous work for further comparison