A study of graph coloring heuristics and its application to a time tabling problem in a registration and scheduling system

Al-Muhaidib, Saud Mohammed (1991) A study of graph coloring heuristics and its application to a time tabling problem in a registration and scheduling system. Masters thesis, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals.

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The Ministry of Education of Saudi Arabia has converted most high schools in the Kingdom to the semester-credit-system (SCS). Even though it is a sophisticated system, a number of problems arose with its implementation. Registration of students, scheduling of courses and examination scheduling are tedious tasks of the system to be carried out smoothly. In the first part of this work we design and implement a registration and examination scheduling system. The solution to scheduling uses graph coloring heuristics on the course conflict graph produced from the student registration file. Different variants of examination and time-tabling problems can be formulated as graph vertex coloring problems. In the second part of this work we present various heuristics to the NP-Hard coloring problem. We also introduce the concepts of node-splitting and node-spilling. These concepts are helpful in situations where a desired k-coloring is necessary, even if the problem instance does not admit a k-coloring. In the final part of the thesis we conduct a detailed empirical study of the efficiency and quality of various heuristics, and propose a hybrid algorithm that mimics the best heuristic for the given graph instance.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Date:	July 1991
Date Type:	Completion
Subjects:	Computer
Divisions:	College Of Computer Sciences and Engineering > Information and Computer Science Dept
Creators:	Al-Muhaidib, Saud Mohammed
Committee Advisor:	Ghanta, Subbarao
Committee Members:	Shaikh, A. K. and Shafique, Muhammed
ID Code:	10196
Deposited By:	KFUPM ePrints Admin
Deposited On:	22 Jun 2008 16:58
Last Modified:	26 Apr 2011 07:59

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