DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF EXAMINATION TIMETABLING SOFTWARE USING GENERIC ALGORITHMS AND SIMULATED ANNEALING

General Overview: The difficulties of developing appropriate examination time table for institutions and tertiary is increasing. Institutions are enrolling more students into wider variety of courses in many different fields. For example, at Osun State Polytechnic, Iree, approximately 14,000 students have to be filled into about 150 exams over two and a half week’s period.

The examination timetable problem regards the scheduling for the exams of a set of polytechnic courses, avoiding overlaps of exams of courses having common students, and spreading the exams for the students as much as possible.

Examination scheduling (timetabling) is a very important process in education institutions. The main challenge is to schedule examinations to timeslots and rooms over a specific period while satisfying a set of constraints. The previous attempts were based on the graph coloring concept. In this case the vertices represent causes, and join two vertices only if they cannot be scheduled at the same time. The problem is therefore to find the chromatic number of resulting graph.

One of the major approaches in exam timetabling over the years has been constraint programming approach (Simulated Annealing). This method constraint programming logic language (chip) also to solve exam timetabling problem. Constraint programme phase provide an initial solution and a simulated annealing phase to improve the quality of solutions.