A TABU SEARCH ALGORITHM TO SOLVE A COURSE TIMETABLING PROBLEM

University course timetabling problems must be solved by the administration every year, or even term, and they involve a large amount of human and material resources. In the literature, the problem formulation does not contain the constraint that there should be no conflict between lessons in the same section. In this paper it is shown how a course timetabling problem which also includes this constraint can be formulated, and a tabu search algorithm is proposed to solve this problem. To show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, it is applied to the timetabling problem of the Statistics Department of Hacettepe University using a computer program based on this algorithm. It is observed that the proposed algorithm produces very good timetables that contain no conflict between lessons in the same section.