Using Iterated Local Search to Solve the Course Timetabling Problem at Engineering Faculty of Necmettin Erbakan University

Kemal Alaykiran, Mehmet Hacibeyoglu

Timetabling of courses, lecturers and available rooms at an educational institution is a hard optimization problem to solve. In this study, the timetabling problem at Engineering Faculty of Necmettin Erbakan University located in Konya,Turkiye is considered. The Engineering Faculty of Necmettin Erbakan University is a new but rapidly developing educational unit. Although it is established in 2010, in 2016 it has reached to 12 undergraduate engineering departments with about 1500 undergraduate students. As the literature for the timetabling problems investigated, it is figured out that the problem considered in this study best fits the curriculum based course timetabling problem which is detailed and structured at International Timetabling Competition (ITC) in 2007. The main objective of the problem is to develop an algorithm and methodology to achieve feasible timetables for the faculty for all semesters. The side goals of the study are to decrease the total number of rooms for all courses and to decrease the periods of courses in a day which is ten at the current situation. In order to achieve these goals, an iterated local search algorithm is coded and run for different scenarios. The experimental results are analyzed comprehensively.