A Survey of Computational Intelligence in Educational Timetabling

Timetabling problems have been widely studied, of which Educational Timetabling Problem (ETP) is the biggest section. Generally, ETP can be divided into three modules, namely, course timetabling, school timetabling, and examination timetabling. For solving ETP, many techniques have been developed including conventional algorithms and computational intelligence approaches. Several surveys have been conducted focusing on those methods. Some surveys target on particular categories; some tend to cover all types of approaches. However, there are lack of reviews specifically focusing on computational intelligence in ETP. Therefore, this paper aims at providing a reference of selecting a method for the applications of ETP by reviewing popular computational intelligent algorithms, such as meta-heuristics, hyper-heuristics, hybrid methods, fuzzy logic, and multi-agent systems. The application would be categorised and described into the three types of ETP respectively.