A Combination of PSO and Local Search in University Course Timetabling Problem

The university course timetabling problem is a combinatorial optimization problem concerning the scheduling of a number of subjects into a finite number of timeslots in order to satisfy a set of specified constraints. The timetable problem can be very hard to solve, especially when attempting to find a near-optimal solutions, with a large number of instances. This paper presents a combination of particle swarm optimization and local search to effectively search the solution space in solving university course timetabling problem. Three different types of dataset range from small to large are used in validating the algorithm. The experiment results show that the combination of particle swarm optimization and local search is capable to produce feasible timetable with less computational time, comparable to other established algorithms.