Development of algorithms for high schools course timetabling problem in Tanzania: the Case of Tambaza, Azania and Jangwani High Schools

The High School Course Timetabling Problem (HSCTP) focuses on the weekly scheduling for all the lessons of a high school. The problem consists of assigning lessons to periods in such a way that no teacher (class) is involved in more than one lesson at a time and such that other side constraints are satisfied. HSCTP is NP- Hard, i.e. a class of optimization problems whereby no optimal solution procedure is known to solve the problem in a reasonable time scale. Currently course timetables in Tanzanian‟s High schools are constructed manually depending on the experience of the scheduler. This has resulted into wastage of time and resources in the education system. For these reasons, designing techniques for the automatic generation of timetables is of major interest. In this study, we have developed a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm for generating high school course timetables in Tanzania. The algorithm was developed with the special focus on the case study done at Tambaza, Azania and Jangwani high schools in Dar es Salaam. The algorithm has been described and tested using real data from the three high schools. It has been found that this global heuristic technique gives better results given a careful selection of parameters.