Case-Based Reasoning in Course Timetabling: An Attribute Graph Approach

An earlier Case-based Reasoning (CBR) approach developed by the authors for educational course timetabling problems employed structured cases to represent the complex relationships between courses. The retrieval searches for structurally similar cases in the case base. In this paper, the approach is further developed to solve a wider range of problems. We also attempt to retrieve those cases that have common similar structures with some differences. Costs that are assigned to these differences have an input upon the similarity measure. A large number of experiments are performed consisting of different randomly produced timetabling problems and the results presented here strongly indicate that a CBR approach could provide a significant step forward in the development of automated systems to solve difficult timetabling problems. They show that using relatively little effort, we can retrieve these structurally similar cases to provide high quality timetables for new timetabling problems.