School Timetabling in Theory and Practice A comparative study of Simulated Annealing and Tabu Search

Abstract: School timetabling is way of distributing resources such as teachers and classrooms over a fixed period of time. This task can be difficult and very time-consuming. If the process of generating timetables is automated with the help of algorithms then this can help save both time and money for the educational institute. In this thesis a general timetable is presented along with a set of constraints commonly used in school timetabling. Two meta heuristic algorithms with previous satisfying results, Simulated Annealing and Tabu Search, are implemented and benchmarked against each other in order to evaluate the performance of these. The results show that although both algorithms are good candidates for creating timetables, Simulated Annealing has the edge both in run time and the quality of the timetable.