Case Based Heuristic Selection for Examination Timetabling

The work presented in this paper could be thought of as a case based hyper-heuristic approach for examination timetabling problems. A hyper-heuristic can be taken to be an automated approach to choose heuristics. Heuristics and meta-heuristics are employed in this capacity in [1] and [2]. In this paper the case-based paradigm is explored as a heuristic selector for examination timetabling problems. We suggest heuristics during the problem solving process by employing heuristics which worked well on previous similar situations and that are memorized in a case base. The suggestions for heuristics are made according to the knowledge of modeling the partial solutions within particular periods of problem solving with specific heuristics, which are discovered by tabu search. Experimental results show that this approach performs better than individual heuristics and they indicate much potential future work to be carried out in this area.