Fuzzy Multiple Heuristic Ordering for Course Timetabling

In this paper, we address the issue of ordering events by simultaneously considering three separate heuristics using fuzzy methods. Combinations of the following three heuristic orderings are employed: largest degree, saturation degree and largest enrollment. The fuzzy weight of an event is used to represent how difficult it is to schedule. The decreasingly ordered events are sequentially chosen to be assigned to the last slot with least penalty cost value while the feasibility of the timetable is maintained throughout the process. Unscheduling and rescheduling events is performed until all events are scheduled. The proposed algorithm has been tested on 11 benchmark data sets of course timetabling problems and the results show that this approach can produce good quality solutions with low requirements for rescheduling. Moreover, there is significant potential to extend the approach further by including a larger range of criteria.