A Heuristic Approach to Course Scheduling Problem

Abstract

Today the number of students in every educational institution increased a lot. As a result more courses are to be offered by the institutions and employ more teachers as well. Day by day due the increase of the courses and course teachers the assigning of teachers to respective courses has become time worthy and difficult. This raises a problem in the educational sector. Till now a lot of researches have been carried out to find reasonable algorithms for efficient automated processes. In this paper we tried to solve the problem of assigning teachers to respective courses. The problem arises when a timetable is to be prepared without overlapping the class timings. We have developed an algorithm for automated system based on searching and sorting. Moreover the process will advance with two separate lists of teachers and course. As an additional constraint we have considered the preferred course for each teacher. The final output will be a complete time table. The algorithm was designed on the basis of a simulation with a set of teachers and class schedules of a University. The simulation produced solutions that can be favorably compared with the solutions proposed by the experts.