An ant colony algorithm for universiti sultan zainal abidin examination timetabling problem

Abstract

The real-life construction of examination timetabling problem is considered as a common problem that always encountered and experienced in educational institution whether in school, college, and university. This problem is usually experienced by the academic management department where they have trouble to handle complexity for assign examination into a suitable timeslot manually. In this paper, an algorithm approach of ant colony optimisation (ACO) is presented to find an effective solution for dealing with Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin (UniSZA) examination timetabling problems. A combination of heuristic with ACO algorithm contributes the development solution in order to simplify and optimize the pheromone occurrence of matrix updates which include the constraints problem. The implementation of real dataset instances from academic management is applied to the approach for generating the result of examination timetable. The result and performance that obtained will be used for further use to evaluate the quality and observe the solution whether our examination timetabling system is reliable and efficient than the manual management that can deal the constraints problem.