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Online/offline Course and Multiple Lecturers Scheduling Using Meta-Heuristic Approaches

Published: 20 August 2023 Publication History

Abstract

The university course timetabling problem (UCTTP) is one of the university's real-world challenging problems. The practical timetable must be scheduled so that it is suitable for lecturers, students, and available resources. The complexity of the university course scheduling problem, thus, arises from the simultaneous existence of several constraints and the large number of possible solutions. Moreover, each university may have its own set of constraints or distinguishing characteristics. In this study, a mathematical model with two new constraints that reflect the current event of the real-world situation is proposed. The first constraint is related to the COVID-19 situation, which allows for the simultaneous scheduling of online and offline courses, and the second constraint is related to the scheduling of courses with multiple lecturers. Both constraints allow online/offline courses and courses with multiple lecturers to be scheduled at the same timeslot, unlike traditional constraints that only allow one course or one lecturer per timeslot. Even though the proposed constraints complicate the university course timetabling problem, they provide a better reflection on a real-world problem. Two meta-heuristic approaches will be used to solve the proposed model: the Genetic Algorithm (GA) and the Harmony Search Algorithm (HS). Integer programming is used as a benchmark algorithm. The experimental findings demonstrate that GA outperforms HS and integer programming in terms of cost, unscheduled course hours, and practicality.

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  • (2024)PANDEMİ KOŞULLARI ALTINDA DERS PROGRAMI ÇİZELGELEME PROBLEMİNİN GENETİK ALGORİTMA İLE ÇÖZÜMÜ: BİR UYGULAMAErciyes Üniversitesi İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi Dergisi10.18070/erciyesiibd.1486042(79-94)Online publication date: 30-Dec-2024

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    ICCTA '23: Proceedings of the 2023 9th International Conference on Computer Technology Applications
    May 2023
    270 pages
    ISBN:9781450399579
    DOI:10.1145/3605423
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 20 August 2023

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    Author Tags

    1. Genetic Algorithm
    2. Harmony Search Algorithm
    3. Meta-heuristic Algorithm
    4. University Course Timetabling

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    • (2024)PANDEMİ KOŞULLARI ALTINDA DERS PROGRAMI ÇİZELGELEME PROBLEMİNİN GENETİK ALGORİTMA İLE ÇÖZÜMÜ: BİR UYGULAMAErciyes Üniversitesi İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi Dergisi10.18070/erciyesiibd.1486042(79-94)Online publication date: 30-Dec-2024

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