Timetabling The Classes Of University With A Evolutionary Algorithm

Course arrangement is an essential component in educational administration, because it leads to orderly teaching activities. However, education administrators are facing difficulties on how to follow the reform of the nation's education system when arranging courses.Course arrangement is a problem of multi-restrict and multi-target optimization, which has been proved to be an NP-complete problem. One of the efficient approaches solving NP-complete problems is genetic algorithm, which is one kind of evolutionary algorithms. Genetic algorithm is a heuristic algorithm with good commonality and robustness, and is widely used in automatic control, combination optimization, image processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and industrial design, thus providing an efficient and feasible method for software-implemented course arrangement.At first, this paper introduces the background about college course arrangement system, especially the researchful status and existing shortcomings, and educes that the genetic algorithm is an ideal approach to resolve the problems of course arrangement. Secondly this paper expounds the genetic algorithm, such as the basic principles, creation, development and characteristics etc. It analyses some new requirements about course arrangement, systematically discusses the influential factors, main restriction and objectives. Then according to the complex requirement of the course arrangement system, this paper adopts an evolutionary algorithm resulting from improving the traditional genetic algorithm, uses the methods of classifying the schedule, designing the dynamic penalty function, abnegating the crossover, selecting the variation strategy and multiple variation operator, etc. and brings up an algorithm framework to resolve the course arrangement problems, that is based on genetic algorithm. At last, this paper discusses the design and implementation of a course arrangement system of Xiangtan University.This paper is based on C++ Builder and Oracle 10g. A course arrangement system is designed and implemented using evolutionary algorithm. This system successfully meets requirements of complex teaching plan, continuous teaching plan, individualized course selecting, grouped teaching plan, multi-type education, and multi-area education.