Using Artificial Fish Swarm Algorithm to Solve University Exam Timetabling Problem

The timetabling problem consists in scheduling a sequence of courses in times period between teachers and students, satisfying a set of constraints of various types. The problem of University Exam Timetabling problem is one of the complex combined problems that universities worldwide struggle with for several times over the course of the year. The objective in this problem is to assign the student exams to times period and rooms in order to meet a series of constraints. The university exam timetabling problem is of difficult problems due to the very large search space, and innovative algorithms are more used to solve it. Several methods have been suggested to solve this problem so far. For the first time, the aim is to present a new method in the present study for university exams timetabling using an artificial fish-swarm algorithm (AFSA), then compare this method with other algorithms in order to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed method. The simulation results indicated that the proposed method is of high efficiency.