A Decision Support System for University Course Timetabling: Persian Gulf University Case Study

University course timetabling problem is a serious challenge for the academic managers in each semester. Because of a vast number of constraints and the complexity of relationship among the constraints, the problem is known to be of hard class. In this paper, a decision support system is proposed to assist the decision makers in solving the university course timetabling. The proposed system produces a feasible and satisfactory solution. The system consists of four sub-systems (1) a database, (2) a dialogue component, (3) a process component, and (4) an optimization component. In order to implement the decision support system, the required software package is developed in C# and Microsoft Access database management system is also used. The optimization component utilizes graph coloring heuristics to solve the problem. The approach of the research is field study. The proposed decision support system has been applied to the faculty of humanities at the Persian Gulf University of Bushehr. Compared to the current methods, the results have shown that the proposed system has a better performance in terms of satisfying constraints, and saving time and money.