Exploring a Flexible Scoring Scheme for a Heuristic Search Technique: A Case Study of University Timetables

Abstract

The university course timetabling management system is proposed in this work. The proposed system applies depth-bounded discrepancy search together with the heuristic and the hard-soft constraints to guide the search to a good solution space. To make the proposed system easy to use by a non-technical user, this work explores a scoring scheme including the effects of the ordering heuristics, the effects of the objective model and the effects of the workload characteristics in order to pre-define a set of configurations and to automatically adapt to the changes in the workload. The experimental results show that the proposed system can find a suitable solution for various workloads. The feedback from the potential users on the proposed system is positive.