university course timetabling using graph-based hyper heuristics

university course timetabling is a complex optimizationproblem. there are many components like departments, faculties, rooms,and students making the problem huge and difficult to solve. eachcomponent enforces a set of normally conflicting constraints on thesolution space. the problem will be solved if courses are scheduled indifferent rooms and within some specific time slots such that a set ofconstraints are satisfied. in this paper, a graph-based hyper-heuristic isproposed to find a solution to the problem. this is a two tiers modelingapproach combining hyper heuristic with graph coloring technique. theupper tier heuristic is used to select a suitable heuristic to find a feasiblesolution on the lower tier. to find the suitability of the proposedapproach, it has been applied to a real world case. the proposed approachwas able to satisfy all the hard and soft constraints. based on the researchfindings, it can be concluded that a graph-based hyper heuristic approachis a suitable and computationally efficient method to find a solution touniversity course timetabling problem.