Using genetic algorithms to solve the South African school timetabling problem

The study presented in this paper applies a genetic algorithm to solve the school timetabling problem for a South African primary school and high school. The overall algorithm makes use of domain knowledge in the form of low-level heuristics to guide the search. The genetic algorithm employed to solve the problems uses tournament selection and mutation operators for the purposes of parent selection and recreation respectively. The algorithm has produced a better quality timetable for the high school problem than that generated by a previous genetic algorithm used to solve this problem. Furthermore, the genetic algorithm has induced a timetable for the primary school that is of better quality than the timetable produced by the system currently used by the school.