Metaheuristic approach for the solution of the multiobjective course scheduling problem

Timetabling problems are commonly encountered in the real life from education institutions to airline companies, from fast food sector to congress organization activities. These problems draws the attention of both practitioners and academicians due to different conditions, structures of constraints and objective functions and difficulties for obtaining optimal solutions of the problem. In the real life timetabling problems are generally difficult to obtain optimal solutions due to structures. Scheduling problems are an NP-hard problem. In this study, a mathematical model was proposed for the preparation of undergraduate program in Kütahya Dumlupınar University Department of Industrial Engineering and usage of the Tabu Search Algorithm. Because the problem has more than one objective, it is considered as a bi-objective optimization problem. One of objective functions is to minimize the students' course overlap and the other one is to determine the preferences of instructors by using AHP Method. Conic scalarization method was used to combine objective functions. By using the obtained data and the developed mathematical model, a software has been developed in Excel Visual Basic which is designed to solve the problem with the Tabu Search Algorithm. Variance Analysis was performed by using Minitab Program and results were compared and the most satisfactory solution was tried to be found. Keywords: Analytic Hierarchy Process, Conic Scalarization, Experimental Design, Optimization, Tabu Search, Timetabling.