Title: Automated university course timetable generator

Authors: Sanjeev Kumar; Rakesh Pandey

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The ICFAI University Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India ' Department of Mathematics, The ICFAI University Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India

Abstract: Scheduling and planning are considered difficult combinatorial optimisation problems and belong to the NP-complete class. The university course timetabling problem (UCTP) is one such type of problem which is to be solved under various constraints. The purpose of this paper is to create a university course timetable generator to automate the university course scheduling process, which is one of the most challenging and cumbersome tasks for the administration. All modules of the proposed timetable generator are inter-linked in SQL database and implemented in C# programming on the .NET platform. The proposed university course timetable generator is tested on several randomly generated problem instances of various complexities to verify the efficiency. The outcomes of them signify the importance of the solver, as it is producing a conflict-free timetable by taking very less amount of time and primary memory.

Keywords: university course timetabling problem; UCTP; combinatorial optimisation; scheduling; timetable generator; C# programming; .NET; SQL server.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2020.109133

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2020 Vol.36 No.1, pp.1 - 16

Received: 19 Nov 2018
Accepted: 18 Jan 2019
Published online: 21 Aug 2020 *

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