NPAC technical report SCCS-781 Academic Scheduling using Simulated Annealing
with a Rule-Based System
Saleh Elmohamed, Paul D. Coddington and Geoffrey C. Fox
Northeast Parallel Architectures Center
Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244
{saleh, paulc, gcf}@npac.syr.edu
In this study we tackle the NP-hard problem of academic class scheduling, or timetabling, at the university level. We have used simulated annealing, with three different cooling schedules being implemented and compared. A rule-based expert system is used as a preprocessor to provide a good starting point for the annealing, which greatly improves the results. A variant of the rule-based system is also used to select the trial schedules in the annealing procedure, which gives a much higher acceptance of the moves. This approach provides a combination of a good starting point, a good cooling schedule, and a good choice of trial moves for the simulated annealing, which together enable us to obtain valid schedules for the timetabling problem for a large university using a complex cost function that includes student preferences.
Keywords : scheduling, timetabling, optimization, simulated annealing, reheating, annealing schedule, expert system.