Solving University Course Timetabling Problem Using AHP Method

University Course Timetabling Problem (UCTTP) is a special case of scheduling problems which is an NP-hard problem. Timetabling deals with the problem of placing certain resources into a limited number of slots. Every year, in our university, every individual department has to design a new timetable for the course for the next academic year. In this paper, a general faculty course assignment problem is considered which includes qualitative and quantitative multiple objectives, work on real-life example and a methodology for finding non-dominated solutions at The ICFAI University in the department of computer science and engineering. The department consists of 6 faculty members and 20 courses offered during the academic session semester-II. Faculties were asked about their preferences before allotting the courses. It often happened that a course received same preference by more than one faculty member, where each faculty might expect that the preferred course should be allotted to him. It is not easy for the administration to select one best faculty among those who have given the same preference. Therefore, a newly developed two-step process consisting of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is provided to deal with the problem. This approach is used to solve nonlinear multi-objective faculty course assignment problem