A comparative analysis of a Tabu Search and a Genetic Algorithm for solving a University Course Timetabling Problem

Sammanfattning: This work implements a Tabu search (TS) algorithm for solving an instance of the University Course Timetabling Problem (UCTP). The algorithm is com- pared to a Genetic algorithm (GA) implemented by Yamazaki and Pertoft (2014) that solves the same instance. The purpose of the work is to explore how the approaches dier for this particular instance, and specifically inves- tigate whether a TS algorithm alone is sucient, considering the small size of the UCTP instance. The TS was based on the OpenTS library (Harder, 2001) and reuses parts from Yamazaki and Pertoft’s (2014) GA. The results show that the TS alone is too slow. Even in a small instance of the UCTP, the search space is too big for the TS to be fast. This confirms the state of the art, that a combination of TS and GA would perform better than either of them individually. Further improvements on the TS would involve reducing the number of moves generated each iteration.