Web-based Student Time-Table Management System
Keywords:
Timetable, Allocation, Genetic Algorithm, coursesAbstract
The scheduling of lectures and practical timetables for a large number of courses is a very complex problem that is frequently managed manually by the center's employees, despite the fact that the outcomes are not always completely satisfactory. Because timetabling is a highly constrained combinational problem (i.e., it concerns the combinations and arrangements of elements in sets), this work attempts to demonstrate the effectiveness of evolutionary techniques based on Darwin's theories in solving the timetabling problem, even if the solution is not fully optimal but close to optimal. An very popular meta-heuristic, the Genetic Algorithm has been successfully applied to a variety of difficult combinational optimization issues. When a local search is done on a multi-dimensional array representing course sets, halls, and time allocations, the results are combined with heuristic crossover to guarantee that fundamental restrictions are not broken. Once a workable timetable system had been developed and verified, the genetic algorithm was used to demonstrate the variety of different schedules that might be generated depending on user-specified limits and requirements. The application was created with PHP and MySQL as the programming languages.
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