Abstract
Combinations of population-based approaches with local search have provided very good results for a variety of scheduling problems. This paper describes the development of a population-based algorithm called Electromagnetism-like mechanism with force decay rate great deluge algorithm for university Course timetabling. This problem is concerned with the assignment of lectures to a specific numbers of timeslots and rooms. For a solution to be feasible, a number of hard constraints Must be satisfied. A penalty value which represents the degree to which various soft constraints are satisfied is measured which reflects the quality of the solution. This approach is tested over established datasets and compared against state-of-the-art techniques from the literature. The results obtained confirm that the approach is able to produce solutions to the Course timetabling problem which demonstrate some of the lowest penalty values in the literature on these benchmark problems.