An Intelligent Bio-Inspired Algorithm for the Faculty Scheduling Problem

All universities have faculty members who need to be assigned to teach courses. Those members have various specialties, preferences and different levels of experience. The manual assignment of courses is a very tedious and time-consuming task that the scheduling committee frequently faces in every department. To solve this timetabling problem, we proposed a novel approach using the Bees Algorithm (BA), which is inspired from bees' foraging behavior, hybridized with Demon algorithm and Hill Climbing for more extensive search. The scheduling process took into consideration all constraints and variables associated with scheduling courses, according to the requirements of the Computer Science department in our college. The results showed that the schedules produced from the algorithm outperformed the manual schedules in terms of achieving the objective function and satisfying the constraints. In addition, the hybridized version produced better results than the standard BA version without hybridization. The hybridized algorithm is designed for faculty scheduling, but can be further generalized to solve various timetabling problems.