A Simulated Annealing for Tahmidi Course Timetabling

Scheduling university timetabling for large numbers of students is a difficult task especially to ensure no overlapping. Most of timetables are prepared manually, or at best with the help of a spreadsheet program. However, a manual process requires numbers of verification by domain experts (for example lecturers, supervisors) before it can be approved. In this research, we focus on a solution to the university timetabling problem. We will consider various soft and hard constraints of time tabling parameters such as a number of subjects (“subject”), a number of lecture or tutorial sessions (“time slots”), a number of classrooms (“sessions”), number of teachers (“teacher”), number of students (“student”) and number of workloads (“workload”). We use methods based on simulated annealing to obtain optimal and sub-optimal solutions to scheduling problems. We will illustrate our work on timetabling issues of Tamhidi Programme at Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia as our case study.