A two-phase heuristic evolutionary algorithm for personalizing course timetables: a case study in a Spanish university

This paper presents, as a case study, the application of a two-phase heuristic evolutionary algorithm to obtain personalized timetables in a Spanish university. The algorithm consists of a two-phase heuristic, which, starting from an initial ordering of the students, allocates students into groups, taking into account the student’s preferences as a primal factor for the assignment. An evolutionary algorithm is then used in order to select the ordering of students which provides the best assignment. The algorithm has been tested in a real problem, the timetable of the Telecommunication Engineering School at Universidade de Vigo (Spain), and has shown good performance in terms of the number of constraints ful6lled and groups assigned to students. ? 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.