A Combination of Metaheuristic Components based on Harmony Search for The Uncapacitated Examination Timetabling

In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of combining the key components of the basic metaheuristic methods on the quality of solutions produced for Uncapacitated Examination Timetabling Problem (UETP). These components are recombination, randomness, and neighbourhood structures. The Harmony search Algorithm (HSA) is used to simulate different combinations of these components. It has three main components: Memory Consideration analogous to recombination, Random Consideration analogous to randomness and Pitch Adjustment analogous to neighbourhood structures. The combinations among metaheuristic components are evaluated using 17 different scenarios each of which reflects a combination of one, two or three components. The results show that the system that combines the three components (recombination, randomness, and neighbourhood structures) provides the best results. Furthermore, the best results obtained from the convergence scenarios were compared with 22 other methods that used a de facto dataset defined by Carter et al. (1996) for UETP. The results excel those produced by the previous methods in 2 out 12 datasets.