Scheduling of examinations timetable using two levels scheduling algorithm:a case study of University of Dar es Salaam

Timetabling problems are among the most common scheduling problems which are applied in most of our daily life. Examination timetabling problem is one of the problem categories of academic scheduling problems. The study was done to schedule examinations timetable for the case of University of Dar es Salaam. In this study a two levels scheduling algorithm was used for the examination timetabling problem at University of Dar es Salaam. The first level of this study was done to remove examinations collision conflicts by the procedure called Recursive Largest First algorithm. All the steps of scheduling by Recursive Largest First are well elaborated in this work until the conflict free examinations were obtained. The second level of scheduling is the examination spacing while minimizing back-to-back examinations. This is done by Simulated Annealing and Tabu Search algorithms where Simulated Annealing shown better results and was more efficient than Tabu Search. The data from the timetabling office of University of Dar es Salaam for both first semester and second semester 2017/18 were used in the manipulation of the algorithm. The algorithm gave promising results free from examination conflicts with minimized back-to-back examinations at UDSM. The running time was set to 900 seconds for both Simulated Annealing and Tabu Search techniques. The results of these were quite satisfactory as elaborated in different tables of this work