Yeah I did my dissertation on this subject - using Perl. Without getting into all the intricate details, a really nice representation is to use a 3D array. $array[ROOM_NUMBER][WEEKDAY][TIMESLOT] = CLASS You are susceptable to the label replacement problem (i.e. classes can be booked more than once, or not at all), but that can be easily fixed by a genetic repair operator which just books them again in the next available slot. To give you an example - take the room capacity violation, it's a hard contraint, the pseudo code may look something like this:

Procedure room_capacity_violation

  For R in 0 .. totalRooms
    For D in 0 .. totalDays    
      For H in 0 .. totalHours
    If (chromosome[R][D][H] != 0)
        If (chromosome[R][D][H]->CLASS_SIZE > room[R]->CLASSROOM_SIZE)
+            count := count + 1
        End If
    End If
      End For
     End For
   End For

Return(count)
End room_capacity_violation
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So you return the count which represents how many times that hard constraint has been violated. This allows you to perform selection based on the best individuals (those who violate the contraints least) - or whatever selection method you use, because sometimes it's good to keep some traits in your population for the sakes of genetic diversity. One benefit that comes from this encoding method is that one contraint is alreadt assured; it is impossible to double book a room. I hope that is of some help (direct or otherwise).