A DNA Based Computational Algorithm for Timetable Problem

Abstract

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) computing believed to have the potential to offer an effective approach to reduce any NP problem from exponential to polynomial time. In this paper a theoretical proof of concept algorithm is proposed to address timetable scheduling problem which is a classical NP complete problem. The efficiency of this algorithm owes to the parallelism property of DNA. Information relating to resources like the set of classes, teachers, time slots and subjects are encoded in the form of unique DNA sequences. Initially all the possible(valid as well as invalid) allocations are generated and in each step the illegal sequences are discarded until finally left out with one or more potential solutions which satisfies the given constraints. The time complexity of the proposed algorithm is independent of the size of the problem. Moreover the proposed algorithm can be applied to solve several other scheduling problems with necessary modifications.