A Meta-Heuristic Approach for The Constraint Satisfaction Problem

This paper studies one of the constraint satisfaction problems (CSP), the university course timetabling problem (CTP). Given the ranges of each variable and a series of constraints, the objective of a CSP is to find a feasible assignment for each variable satisfying all the constraints. By analyzing the course schedule history from one university, we present the mathematical formulation of the CTP and introduce a meta-heuristic approach to solve this challenging problem. Apart from the neighborhood structure for this specific problem, a corresponding fast-incremental evaluation method is also proposed. Experimental results show the high efficiency of the proposed algorithm.