The effect of construction heuristics on the performance of a genetic algorithm for the school timetabling problem

Authors:
Rushil Raghavjee;Nelishia Pillay
Affiliations:
University of KwaZulu-Natal, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa;University of KwaZulu-Natal, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Venue:
Proceedings of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists Conference on Knowledge, Innovation and Leadership in a Diverse, Multidisciplinary Environment
Year:
2011

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Abstract

This paper examines the effect of using construction heuristics on the evolutionary process for the domain of school timetabling. The paper firstly presents a genetic algorithm to solve the school timetabling problem. the paper compares the performance of a GA with randomly creating potential solutions in the initial population with that of a GA using a construction heuristic for developing the initial solutions. Two construction heuristics, namely, largest degree and saturation degree are studied. The GA's are applied to a data set of six real world problems made available for the Greek school timetabling problem. This study has revealed that the use of construction heuristics improves the performance of the GA to produce better quality timetables. Furthermore, different construction heuristics produce better results for different problems.