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A PARALLEL GENETIC ALGORITHM FOR SOLVING THE SCHOOL TIMETABLING PROBLEM

Genetic algorithms (GA) have been applied to a number of optimisation problems with some success [1]. The algorithms mimic the process of natural selection, with the effect of creating a number of potentially optimal solutions to some complex search problem. One of the major disadvantages of genetic algorithms is that they are very slow. In this paper we discuss the application of a GA to the school timetabling problem, and show how the execution time can be reduced by using a commercial shared memory multiprocessor. The paper reports some results from the sequential execution of the algorithm as well as the speedup attained from the parallel solution.