Designing a multi-agent approach system for distributed course timetabling

This paper proposes tackling the difficult course timetabling problem using a multi-agent approach. The proposed design seeks to deal with the problem using a distributed solution environment in which a mediator agent coordinates various timetabling agents that cooperate to improve a common global solution. Initial timetables provided to the multi-agent system are generated using several hybrid heuristics that combine graph colouring heuristics and local search in different ways. The hybrid heuristics are capable of generating feasible timetables for all instances of the two sets of benchmark problems used here. We discuss how these initialisation hybrid heuristics can be incorporated into the proposed multi-agent approach in order to conduct distributed timetabling. This preliminary work serves as a solid basis towards the design of an effective multi-agent distributed timetabling system.