Solving high school timetabling problems worldwide using selection hyper-heuristics

• Published in: Expert systems with applications Vol. 42; no. 13; pp. 5463 - 5471
• Main Authors: Ahmed, Leena N., Özcan, Ender, Kheiri, Ahmed
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.08.2015
• Subjects: Adaptive move acceptance; Adaptive operator selection; Austenitic stainless steels; Benchmarking; Combinatorial analysis; Combinatorial optimisation; Competition; Constraint satisfaction; Educational timetabling; Expert systems; Great deluge; Low level; Optimization; Resource scheduling; Constraint satisfaction; Adaptive move acceptance; Great deluge; Adaptive operator selection; Combinatorial optimisation; Educational timetabling
• ISSN: 0957-4174; 1873-6793; 1873-6793
• DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2015.02.059

•Different selection hyper-heuristics are analysed on high school timetabling problem.•Random permutation and adaptive great-deluge move acceptance method performs better.•The approach ranks the second comparing to approaches competed at ITC2011 competition. High school timetabling is one of those recurring NP-hard real-world combinatorial optimisation problems that has to be dealt with by many educational institutions periodically, and so has been of interest to practitioners and researchers. Solving a high school timetabling problem requires scheduling of resources and events into time slots subject to a set of constraints. Recently, an international competition, referred to as ITC 2011 was organised to determine the state-of-the-art approach for high school timetabling. The problem instances, obtained from eight different countries across the world used in this competition became a benchmark for further research in the field. Selection hyper-heuristics are general-purpose improvement methodologies that control/mix a given set of low level heuristics during the search process. In this study, we evaluate the performance of a range of selection hyper-heuristics combining different reusable components for high school timetabling. The empirical results show the success of the approach which embeds an adaptive great-deluge move acceptance method on the ITC 2011 benchmark instances. This selection hyper-heuristic ranks the second among the previously proposed approaches including the ones competed at ITC 2011.