TY - EJOU AU - Al-Tarawneh, Hassan AU - Al-Kaabneh, Khalid AU - Alhroob, Aysh AU - Migdady, Hazem AU - Alhadid, Issam TI - A Hybrid Heuristic Algorithm for Solving COVID-19’s Social Distancing at Universities Campus T2 - Computer Systems Science and Engineering PY - 2022 VL - 41 IS - 3 SN - AB - Social distancing during COVID-19 has become one of the most important measures in reducing the risks of the spread of the virus. Implementing these measures at universities is crucial and directly related to the physical attendance of the populations of students, professors, employees, and other members on campus. This research proposes an automated scheduling approach that can help universities and schools comply with the social distancing regulations by providing assistance in avoiding huge assemblages of people. Furthermore, this paper proposes a novel course timetable-scheduling scheme based on four main constraints. First, a distance of two meters must be maintained between each student inside the classroom. Second, no classrooms should contain more than 20% of their regular capacity. Third, there would be no back-to-back classes. Lastly, no lectures should be held simultaneously in adjacent classrooms. The proposed approach was implemented using a variable neighborhood search (VNS) approach with an adaptive neighborhood structure (AD-NS) to resolve the problem of scheduling course timetables at Al-Ahlyyia Amman University. However, the experimental results show that the proposed techniques outperformed the standard VNS tested on university course timetabling benchmark dataset ITC2007-Track3. Meanwhile, the approach was tested using datasets collected from the faculty of information technology at Al-Ahlyyia Amman University (Jordan). Where the results showed that, the proposed technique could help educational institutes to resume their regular operations while complying with the social distancing guidelines. KW - COVID-19; social distance; variable neighborhood search; adaptive neighborhood structure; university course timetable DO - 10.32604/csse.2022.021078