A Late Acceptance Strategy in Hill-Climbing for Exam Timetabling Problems

Over the years, many variants, extensions and adaptations of local search techniques have appeared in the literature. Some of them have become extremely famous, such as Simulated Annealing. Other ones have almost been forgotten, for example, “Record-toRecord Travelling” (Dueck 1993) or the “Old Bachelor Acceptance Algorithm” (Hu et al. 1995). In this abstract, we are proposing another new local search strategy. It is simple and, in many ways, rather obvious. We have made an exhaustive search through the optimization literature, but have not found the same idea in a published paper. We have termed this method the “Late Acceptance Strategy”. However, if it eventually emerges that the same approach has already been published then this paper could be considered to be a reminder about a “forgotten” way of improving a local search procedure.