A metaheuristic approach to the school timetabling problem at IFRN

School timetabling. GRASP. Metaheuristics. 

Every academic year, educational institutions face the need to allocate their classes. The challenge lies in conciling pedagogical needs, organizational resource constraints, and personal preferences. Motivated by the high complexity of combining teacher, student, and classroom availability, as well as various other constraints, the school timetabling problem has long been studied by the academic community. In this context, (meta)heuristic approaches have been the method-of-choice when finding high-quality solutions in a feasible timespan. This work proposes a greedy randomized adaptative search procedure (GRASP) algorithm for the school timetabling problem targeting the technical courses offered at Instituto Federal de Educação Ciência e Tecnologia do Rio Grande do Norte (IFRN). To validate the proposed approach, real-world instances were built from data gathered at different campi and academic years. Results indicate the effectiveness of the algorithm, given the feasible solutions meeting all constraints initially considered while achieving high quality.