Abstract
The university timetabling problem is a scheduling problem that many educational institutions need to solve in order to plan their courses and/or exams by allocating these events to specific timeslots, rooms, lecturers...etc. There are also a number of hard and soft constraints that must be observed while solving this problem, which makes the solution algorithm a challenge for researchers. Genetic Algorithms (GAs) is a popular meta-heuristic technique that has been successfully applied to many hard combinatorial optimization problems, among which are timetabling and scheduling problems. In this paper we describe some GA techniques that have recently been applied to different variants of the university timetabling problem producing promising results. We briefly describe the overall technique, focusing on the chromosome representation and the crossover and mutation operators. A summary of the described algorithms and their most distinguishing features is then presented at the end of this paper.