A New Model for University Course Timetabling Problem Using Fuzzy Goal Programming Approach and Genetic Algorithm

The university course-timetabling problem is assigning the available time slots, resources and other facilities in an educational environment like a university, such that the overall utilities of the professors, teacher assistants, students and employees are satisfied as high as possible and the rules or constraints of the university are not violated. In this paper, considering the criteria and conditions of the Tabriz branch of Islamic Azad University, a new multi-objective linear mathematical programming model for this problem with four objectives is proposed and it is solved using fuzzy goal programming approach to aggregate the objective functions in order to maximize the minimum utility of the objective functions. Due to the NP-Hard complexity of the proposed mathematical model, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) is also developed for solving the model. Two different departments from the university are selected as case studies and the related manual data are given as the input data to the proposed model. Comparing the obtained results on the real data adopted from departments with the results obtained by head of the department using the manual traditional methods shows the superiority of the proposed model in obtaining the better solutions having more utilities.