Designing a multi-agent approach system for distributed course timetabling

Obit, Joe Henry; Landa-Silva, Dario; Ouelhadj, Djamila; Khan Vun, Teong; Alfred, Rayner

Abstract

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.

Citation

Obit, J. H., Landa-Silva, D., Ouelhadj, D., Khan Vun, T., & Alfred, R. (2011). Designing a multi-agent approach system for distributed course timetabling.

• Conference Name: Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Hybrid Intelligent Systems Conference (IEEE-HIS 2011)
• End Date: Dec 8, 2011
• Publication Date: Dec 1, 2011
• Deposit Date: Apr 4, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 4, 2016
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: course timetabling, heuristics metaheuristics, intelligent multi-agents
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1009539
• Publisher URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6122088
• Additional Information: Published in 2011 IEEE International Conference on Hybrid Intelligent Systems (HIS) IEEE, 2011, ISBN: 9781457721519 pp. 103-108, doi: 10.1109/HIS.2011.6122088