Project Title: Heuristic Local Search Tutorial on Tackling a Real Life Combinatorial Problem
Student: Suhuaila Mohd Hussin
Course: Bsc in Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence

Abstract:
Regardless of their major, students are more likely to have misconceptions throughout their learning process. 
Consequently, with supporting evidence, it's been claimed that students are able to grasp a concept much easier 
and quicker through visual and interaction. These circumstances also apply to computer science students where 
their learning stages inevitably involves designing and implementing various types of algorithms for problem 
solving and meta-heuristic is one of them. Meta-heuristic approaches are ideal in tackling combinatorial problems 
which are impossible to deal within limited computational time. Educating computer science students in application 
of the approaches will make themselves to be even more valuable contributors in diverse domains such as logistics, 
computational biology, engineering design, networking, transportation, data mining, finance and etc. Among the 
meta-heuristic approaches, this dissertation aims to develop an online system that effectively educates the 
students about the classic yet still widely used technique called local search. The system comprises two major 
components which are now integrated as they were created separately at an earlier development phase of the project. 
The first component is the implementation of an evolved local search algorithm along with a combinatorial problem. 
The combinatorial problem presented in the dissertation is a real life situation which could bring an extra benefits 
to the students' knowledge. The second component of the tutorial system is the interaction functions that are embedded 
in the tutorial system. It is for the purpose of expressively and effectively presenting the information of local 
search. The dissertation begins with further detailed of motivation for the project, followed by elaborative aspects 
of optimization and heuristic local search, evaluation of the existing systems for justifying the system development, 
system requirements, its designs and developments of the two main components. With unit testing, a number of problems 
emerged throughout the development of the first component. Some of them were successfully encountered and there are 
some that still persists yet considered tolerable. The most difficult phase of the project was narrowing down the 
broad concepts of heuristic local search to the specific aspects that would be presented in the tutorial system. 
Due to this, the time planned for research and analyse phase had exceeded, leaving a strictly remaining time for 
conducting the rest of the project phases. To avoid this from happening again to any future projects, time management 
should be revised wisely.