Course timetable construction is a tedious, repetitive and time-consuming task that every timetable scheduler has to face each academic period. The conjunction of a large volume of data, the diversification of teaching methods and the ever-increasing requirements in curricula make the timetable scheduling difficult to solve. It is not uncommon that many of the produced timetables are far from satisfactory from the point of view of both the students and teachers. As a result, this problem deserves further study....[ Read more ]

Course timetable construction is a tedious, repetitive and time-consuming task that every timetable scheduler has to face each academic period. The conjunction of a large volume of data, the diversification of teaching methods and the ever-increasing requirements in curricula make the timetable scheduling difficult to solve. It is not uncommon that many of the produced timetables are far from satisfactory from the point of view of both the students and teachers. As a result, this problem deserves further study.

According to Junginger (1986), "A course timetable problem is a schedule of meetings of classes (or students) and lecturers, over a definite period of time while requiring certain resources (for example, rooms) and fulfilling a number of requirements."

This thesis examines the problem of finding a set of good published heuristic assignment strategies to the course timetable problem of a university's engineering department. The main objective of this study is to investigate and compare the performances of the heuristics in different scenarios. Simulations are done to detect the effects of various variables on the performance of the twelve chosen heuristic scheduling rules and the quality of the response. The significant variables are then identified.

This work has shown that no single heuristic scheduling rule outperforms all others under all situations.