3rd International Engineering Conference on Developments in Civil & Computer Engineering Applications (IEC2017)
Title: Minimum Student exam conflict in Exam Time Tabling using Symbiotic Organisms Search
Authors: Rina D. Zarro, Mardin A. Anwer, Zana Farhad
DOI: 10.23918/iec2017.11
Abstract: Time tabling problem has been widely investigated by many researches in the past two decades. However, these problems and their difficulties may vary according to its size, structure or constraints. In this paper, the exam time table for software engineering department is solved using Symbiotic Organisms Search (SOS) algorithm. The algorithm tries to minimize the number of presented conflicts in student exams for those who may possibly have more than one exam in the same day. The problem arises from the current regulations where student can pass to the next year with one failed subject or those transferred students from other universities with more than one subject required to be covered from earlier stages. This paper tries to replace the current manual process with an automatic table generating system. The solution is divided into two phases. First stage is to formulate the objective function and its constraints. In the second phase, Symbiotic Organisms search is incorporated to find the best exam time table with minimum conflict. The SOS algorithm is modified to work on fixed integer permutation representation by introducing a novel way of finding the next new solutions from the existing solutions. For testing the proposed method, software engineering second attempt exam case study is used to test the proposed solution. The algorithm found to perform faster than genetic algorithm and particle swarm algorithms.
Keywords: Exam Time Table, Symbiotic Organism Search Algorithm, Optimization Technique.