Research in the field of examination timetabling has developed in two directions. The first looks at applying various methodologies to induce examination timetables. The second takes an indirect approach to the problem and examines the generation of heuristics or combinations of heuristics, i.e. hyper-heuristics, to be used in the construction of examination timetables. The study presented in t...

The examination timetabling problem belongs to the class of combinatorial optimization problems and is of great importance for every University. In this paper, a hybrid evolutionary algorithm running on a GPU is employed to solve the examination timetabling problem. The hybrid evolutionary algorithm proposed has a genetic algorithm component and a greedy steepest descent component. The GPU comp...

The examination timetabling problem represents a major administrative activity for academic institutions. An increasing number of student enrolments, a wider variety of courses and increasing number of combined degree courses contribute to the growing challenge of developing examination timetabling software to cater for the broad spectrum of constraints required by educational institutions. In ...

Automated examination timetabling has been addressed by a wide variety of methodologies and techniques over the last ten years or so. Many of the methods in this broad range of approaches have been evaluated on a collection of benchmark instances provided at the University of Toronto in 1996. Whilst the existence of these datasets has provided an invaluable resource for research into examinatio...

The examination timetabling problem has been extensively studied since Carter produced a collection of real instances [1] (for a recent survey see [2]). This year, a significant extension to the set of realistic instances has been provided by the examination timetabling track [3] of the 2007 International Timetabling Competition2. The exam track instances are much more realistic than the Carter...

This paper investigates a hybridisation of the very large neighbourhood search approach with local search methods to address examination timetabling problems. In this paper, we describe a 2 phase approach. The first phase employs “multi start” to carry out search upon a very large neighbourhood of solutions using graph theoretical algorithms implemented on an improvement graph. The second phase...

Examination timetabling problem (ETP) is one of the most important issues in universities. An improper timetable may result in students' dissatisfaction as it may not let them study enough between two sequential exams. In addition, the many exams to be scheduled, the large number of students who have taken different courses, the limited number of rooms, and some constraints su...

A lot of research has been conducted on hyper-heuristics for examination timetabling. However, most of this work has been focused on an uncapacitated version of the problem. This study reports on evolving hyper-heuristics for a highly constrained version of the problem, namely, the set of problems from the second International Timetabling Competition (ITC ’07). Previous work has shown that usin...