Evaluation of School Timetabling Algorithms

Abstract: Most schools have the problem that they need to organise the meetings between students and teachers in lectures and place these lectures in a timetable. Four different algorithms that can be used to solve this problem will be evaluated in this thesis. The algorithms are Simulated Annealing, Particle Swarm Optimisation, Hyper-Heuristic Genetic Algorithm and Iterated Local Search. In this thesis a description of the algorithms will be given and then evaluated by running them on a set of different known timetabling problems and have their results compared with each other to find out which algorithm is best suited for use in a potential end-user application. Simulated Annealing combined with Iterated Local Search gave the best resultsin this thesis.