Solving high school timetabling problems worldwide using selection hyper-heuristics

Ahmed, Leena N., Özcan, Ender and Kheiri, Ahmed ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6716-2130 2015. Solving high school timetabling problems worldwide using selection hyper-heuristics. Expert Systems with Applications 42 (13) , pp. 5463-5471. 10.1016/j.eswa.2015.02.059

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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
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Mathematics
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics
Publisher:	Elsevier
ISSN:	0957-4174
Last Modified:	06 May 2023 08:28
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/85715

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