Parallel Hybrid Meta heuristic algorithm for university course timetabling problem (PHACT)

The scheduling of courses in universities is known to be a highly constraint NP-hard problem, that is a class of optimization problems attracted by many researchers. Our solution uses hybrid algorithm for solving polynomial with satisfying all problem constraints. Of the many researches have been applied to solving the problem automatically, Meta-heuristic techniques have shown better results. In this paper we present a method based on Hybrid Meta-heuristic approach to solve university course timetabling problem. This approach has two sequential phases with overall parallel implementation; it has a main algorithm that employed prescheduling structure and overall high performance MPI algorithm. This algorithm shows 92% speedup over serial implementation. The system is tested with real data from Islamic Azad University of Iran.