Comparison Of Metaheuristic Algorithms With A Methodology Of Design For The Evaluation Of Hard Constraints Over The Course Timetabling Problem

The Course Timetabling problem is one of the most difficult and common problems inside an university. The main objective of this problem is to obtain a timetabling with the minimum student conflicts between assigned activities. A Methodology of design is a strategy applied before the execution of an algorithm for timetabling problem. This strategy has recently emerged, and aims to improve the obtained results as well as provide a context-independent layer to different versions of the timetabling problem. This methodology offers to an interested researcher the advantage of solving different set instances with a single algorithm which is a new paradigm in the timetabling problem state of art. In this paper the proposed methodology is tested with several metaheuristic algorithms over some well-know set instances such as Patat 2002 and 2007. The main objective in this work is to find which metaheuristic algorithm shows a better performance in terms of quality, used together with the Design Methodology. The algorithms chosen are from the area of evolutionary computation, Cellular algorithms and Swarm Intelligence. Finally our experiments use some non-parametric statistical test like Kruskal-Wallis test and wilcoxon signed rank test.