In this paper we introduce a new optimization method for the examinations scheduling problem. Rather than attempting direct optimization of assignments of exams to specific time-slots, we perform permutations of slots and reassignments of exams upon the feasible (but not optimal) schedules obtained by the standard graph colouring method with Largest Degree ordering. The proposed optimization me...

Although they have been investigated for more than two decades, university examination timetabling problems are still considered challenging and interesting problems. In our study, we are investigating student preferences for the control of the time gaps between examinations; specifically, what students consider to be best for them and also fair between students. To support this, we conducted a...

OR methods have been successfully applied in the evaluation of team performance. Team managers, players, fans, and journalists are often eager to know how close a team is of classification. Probabilistic and exact methods are used to tackle this question. Timetabling is the major OR application in sports. Sport leagues and teams need schedules satisfying different types of constraints and optim...

UCTTP is a NP-hard problem, which must be performed for each semester frequently. The major technique in the presented approach would be analyzing data to resolve uncertainties of lecturers’ preferences and constraints within a department in order to obtain a ranking for each lecturer based on their requirements within a department where it is attempted to increase their satisfaction and develo...

Many complex timetabling problems have an underpinning bounded graph colouring component, a pattern penalisation component and a number of side constraints. The bounded graph colouring component corresponds to hard constraints such as “students are in at most one place at one time” and “there is a limited number of rooms” [1]. Despite the hardness of graph colouring, it is often easy to generat...

This paper presents our work on analysing high level heuristics within a graph based hyper-heuristic framework. Local search based methods (Tabu Search and steepest descent method) are compared as the high level heuristics within the graph based hyper-heuristic framework and the analysis of their neighborhood structures and performance on the high level landscape is carried out. An iterated ste...

In this paper we present an application of Tabu Search (TS) to the exams timetabling problem. One of the drawback of this meta-heuristic is related with some parameter that can affect the performance of the algorithm and must be tuned. One of such is tabu tenure which is much problem dependent. Our goal is to have a automatic process of managing the memory which is important for practical appli...

University examination scheduling is a difficult and heavily administrative task, particularly when the number of students and courses is high. Changes in educational paradigms, an increase in the number of students, the aggregation of schools, more flexible curricula, among others, are responsible for an increase in the difficulty of the problem. As a consequence, there is a continuous demand ...

Forming university exam schedules in Southern Africa has always been difficult. It is a scheduling problem with strict rules (hard constraints) and flexible ones (soft constraints). Students must take final for most courses they are enrolled each semester, held supervised setting. Therefore, finding suitable time location student common challenge. This paper proposes solution to this based on t...