  Timetabling is a problem faced in all higher education institutions. The
International Timetabling Competition (ITC) has published a dataset that can be
used to test the quality of methods used to solve this problem. A number of
meta-heuristic approaches have obtained good results when tested on the ITC
dataset, however few have used the ant colony optimization technique,
particularly on the ITC 2007 curriculum based university course timetabling
problem. This study describes an ant system that solves the curriculum based
university course timetabling problem and the quality of the algorithm is
tested on the ITC 2007 dataset. The ant system was able to find feasible
solutions in all instances of the dataset and close to optimal solutions in
some instances. The ant system performs better than some published approaches,
however results obtained are not as good as those obtained by the best
published approaches. This study may be used as a benchmark for ant based
algorithms that solve the curriculum based university course timetabling
problem.
