An ant colony based timetabling tool

Thatchai Thepphakorn, Pupong Pongcharoen and Chris Hicks

International Journal of Production Economics, 2014, vol. 149, issue C, 131-144

Abstract: The timetabling of lecturers, seminars, practical sessions and examinations is a core business process for academic institutions. A feasible timetable must satisfy hard constraints. An optimum timetable will additionally satisfy soft constraints, which are not absolutely essential. An Ant Colony based Timetabling (ANCOT) tool has been developed for solving timetabling problems. New variants of Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) called the Best-Worst Ant System (BWAS) and the Best-Worst Ant Colony System (BWACS) were embedded in the ANCOT program. Local Search (LS) strategies were developed and embedded into BWAS and BWACS to enhance their efficiency and to help find the best timetable with the lowest number of soft constraint violations. Statistical tools for experimental design and analysis were adopted to investigate the factors affecting the BWAS performance. Eight benchmark problems were used for evaluating the performance. For large problems, the BWACS produced the best timetable and was better than the other ACO variants. The best proposed local search strategy enhanced the performance of both the BWAS and the BWACS by up to 74.5%, but this was at the expense of longer execution time.

Keywords: Best-Worst ant; Ant system; Ant colony; Local search; Course timetabling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925527313001904
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:proeco:v:149:y:2014:i:c:p:131-144

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2013.04.026

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Production Economics is currently edited by Stefan Minner

More articles in International Journal of Production Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().