,Omar Ibrahim Obaid , MAZIN ABED MOHAMMED MOHD SHARIFUDDIN BIN AHMAD
Abstract
Many researchers over the last decade have established numerous researches and used many methods to handle universities’ final examination timetabling problem, such as simulated annealing, tabu search, graph coloring techniques, and genetic algorithms. In this research, Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to solve the College of Graduate Studies (CoGS) final examination timetabling problem as it is capable of solving many complex problems. This problem belongs to a class of scheduling problems which is highly constrained and known to be NP-hard. The algorithm has been adapted to solve the research problem whose procedure is different from the common algorithm. The research attempts to find the best solution (best timetable) for CoGS to help UNITEN reduce time and effort for creating examination timetables. New approaches to some of the GAs operators are introduced. These operators include Adaptive Mutation operator that tackles the stasis problem and a crossover scheme called Scattered Crossover to enhance the GA’s ability to produce better solutions with best fitness value in lesser generations. While the Final Examination Timetable System (FETS) is designed especially for UNITEN’s CoGS, it can be used in other universities that have similar administration and management system. The GA system written in MATLAB 7.8.0.347 (R2009A), incorporates the GA operators and a module to construct good quality timetables. The algorithm has proven its success with several experiments that are conducted and the results show that better quality timetable is produced.
مازن الشجيري | Mazin AL-Shujeary | 12375