DEVELOPMENT OF AN AUTOMATED TIMETABLE GENERATOR USING GENETIC ALGORITHM

Abstract

Educational timetabling is a major administrative activity for a wide variety of institutions. The process involves scheduling a
sequence of lectures between lecturers and students in a prefixed period. However, conventional approach to timetable scheduling is very time consuming, therefore, this research addresses the issue by developing an automated timetable generator using genetic algorithm. The developed system satisfied both hard and soft constraints as well as generate a conflict free timetable with an accuracy of 98.5% and an average response time of 0.176 seconds. The results obtained for functionality, reliability, ease of use, efficiency and portability are: 95%, 65%, 80%, 80% and 85% respectively. The mutation and crossover rates are 0.01% and 0.95% respectively and the fitness value is 1 which shows that the developed timetable generator has zero number of clashes. Although, the developed system has achieved a certain level of accuracy, reliability, functionality and ease of use, however, future work should consider hybridizing GA with more advanced algorithms to obtain better results and reduce processing time.