Solving high school timetabling problems worldwide using selection hyper-heuristics

Ahmed, Leena N., Özcan, Ender and Kheiri, Ahmed (2015) Solving high school timetabling problems worldwide using selection hyper-heuristics. Expert Systems with Applications, 42 (13). pp. 5463-5471. ISSN 0957-4174

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Abstract

High school timetabling is one of those recurring NP-hard real-world combinatorial optimisation problems that has to be dealt with by many educational institutions periodically, and so has been of interest to practitioners and researchers. Solving a high school timetabling problem requires scheduling of resources and events into time slots subject to a set of constraints. Recently, an international competition, referred to as ITC 2011 was organised to determine the state-of-the-art approach for high school timetabling. The problem instances, obtained from eight different countries across the world used in this competition became a benchmark for further research in the field. Selection hyper-heuristics are general-purpose improvement methodologies that control/mix a given set of low level heuristics during the search process. In this study, we evaluate the performance of a range of selection hyper-heuristics combining different reusable components for high school timetabling. The empirical results show the success of the approach which embeds an adaptive great-deluge move acceptance method on the ITC 2011 benchmark instances. This selection hyper-heuristic ranks the second among the previously proposed approaches including the ones competed at ITC 2011.

Item Type: Article
RIS ID: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/755526
Keywords: Benchmarking; Combinatorial optimization; Competition; Heuristic methods; Scheduling, Adaptive move acceptance; Adaptive operator selections; Constraint Satisfaction; Great deluge; Timetabling, Optimization
Schools/Departments: University of Nottingham, UK > Faculty of Science > School of Computer Science
Identification Number: 10.1016/j.eswa.2015.02.059
Depositing User: Ozcan, Dr Ender
Date Deposited: 10 Mar 2016 09:34
Last Modified: 04 May 2020 17:11
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/32182

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