@article { , title = {Solving high school timetabling problems worldwide using selection hyper-heuristics}, 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.}, doi = {10.1016/j.eswa.2015.02.059}, eissn = {0957-4174}, issn = {0957-4174}, issue = {13}, journal = {Expert Systems with Applications}, publicationstatus = {Published}, publisher = {Elsevier}, url = {https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/755526}, volume = {42}, keyword = {Benchmarking, Combinatorial optimization, Competition, Heuristic methods, Scheduling, Adaptive move acceptance, Adaptive operator selections, Constraint Satisfaction, Great deluge, Timetabling, Optimization}, year = {2015}, author = {Ahmed, Leena N. and Özcan, Ender and Kheiri, Ahmed} }