Tabu Search with Explicit Adaptive Guiding Heuristic for the Examination Timetabling Problem

An Efficient Tabu Search Heuristic for the School Timetabling Problem

The School Timetabling Problem (STP) regards the weekly scheduling of encounters between teachers and classes. Since this scheduling must satisfy organizational, pedagogical and personal costs, this problem is recognized as a very difficult combinatorial optimization problem. This work presents a new Tabu Search (TS) heuristic for STP. Two different memory based diversification strategies are p...

Tabu Search Based Hyper-heuristic Approaches to Examination Timetabling

Tabu Search Techniques for Examination Timetabling

The Examination Timetabling problem regards the scheduling for the exams of a set of university courses, avoiding the overlapping of exams having students in common, fairly spreading the exams for the students, and satisfying room capacity constraints. We present a family of solution algorithms for a set of variants of the Examination Timetabling problem. The algorithms are based on tabu search...

Adaptive Tabu Search for course timetabling

This paper presents an Adaptive Tabu Search algorithm (denoted by ATS) for solving a problem of curriculum-based course timetabling. The proposed algorithm follows a general framework composed of three phases: initialization, intensification and diversification. The initialization phase constructs a feasible initial timetable using a fast greedy heuristic. Then an adaptively combined intensific...

An Investigation of a Tabu Search Based Hyper-heuristic for Examination Timetabling

This paper investigates a tabu search based hyper-heuristic for solving examination timetabling problems. The hyper-heuristic framework uses a tabu list to monitor the performance of a collection of low-level heuristics and then make tabu heuristics that have been applied too many times, thus allowing other heuristics to be applied. Experiments carried out on examination timetabling datasets fr...