Solving high school timetabling problems worldwide using selection hyper-heuristics

Ahmed, Leena N.; �zcan, Ender; Kheiri, Ahmed

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.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Aug 1, 2015
• Deposit Date: Mar 10, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 10, 2016
• Journal: Expert Systems with Applications
• Print ISSN: 0957-4174
• Electronic ISSN: 0957-4174
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 42
• Issue: 13
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2015.02.059
• Keywords: Benchmarking; Combinatorial optimization; Competition; Heuristic methods; Scheduling, Adaptive move acceptance; Adaptive operator selections; Constraint Satisfaction; Great deluge; Timetabling, Optimization
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/755526
• Publisher URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957417415001670