Significance of Heuristics in Getting Optimal Solution for Class Timetabling

Timetabling means scheduling activities to time slots in an order by satisfying hard constraints and soft constraints. Hard constraints should be satisfied but the violations of soft constraints to be minimized. This problem can be done in Artificial Intelligence or Operations Research domain. Class Timetabling of Undergraduate Science courses of Pondicherry University was implemented using Steepest-Ascent Hill Climbing algorithm and is compared with the proposed approach with heuristics for class timetabling implementation. By analyzing the results obtained in both the methods, significance of applying heuristics to get the optimal solution has been established.