A tabu search algorithm with efficient diversification strategy for high school timetabling problem

Abstract

The school timetabling problem can be described as scheduling a set of lessons (combination of classes, teachers, subjects and rooms) in a weekly timetable. This paper presents a novel way to generate timetables for high schools. The algorithm has three phases. Pre-scheduling, initial phase and optimization through tabu search. In the first phase, a graph based algorithm used to create groups of lessons to be scheduled simultaneously; then an initial solution is built by a sequential greedy heuristic. Finally, the solution is optimized using tabu search algorithm based on frequency based diversification. The algorithm has been tested on a set of real problems gathered from Iranian high schools. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm can effectively build acceptable timetables.