A Constructive Evolutionary Approach to School Timetabling

Filho, Geraldo Ribeiro; Lorena, Luiz Antônio Nogueira

doi:10.1007/3-540-45365-2_14

Cited by 32 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 12 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…An evolutionary algorithm combined with local search that uses specific mutation operators to optimise the given timetables was used to find feasible solutions. Filho et al (2001) used a new representation for the high school timetabling problem by forming clusters from pairs of teachers and classes. The authors applied a constructive genetic algorithm to solve instances of two Brazilian high schools.…”

Section: High School Timetabling Problemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Hidden Markov Model Approach to the Problem of Heuristic Selection in Hyper-Heuristics with a Case Study in High School Timetabling Problems

Kheiri

Keedwell

2017

Evolutionary Computation

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Operations research is a well established field that uses computational systems to support decisions in business and public life. Good solutions to operations research problems can make a large difference to the efficient running of businesses and organisations and so the field often searches for new methods to improve these solutions. The high school timetabling problem is an example of an operations research problem and is a challenging task which requires assigning events and resources to time slots subject to a set of constraints. In this paper a new sequence-based selection hyper-heuristic is presented that produces excellent results on a suite of high school timetabling problems. In this study, we present an easy-to-implement, easy-to-maintain and effective sequence-based selection hyper-heuristic to solve high school timetabling problems using a benchmark of unified real-world instances collected from different countries. We show that with sequence-based methods, it is possible to discover new best known solutions for a number of the problems in the timetabling domain. Through this investigation, the usefulness of sequence-based selection hyper-heuristics has been demonstrated and the capability of these methods has been shown to exceed the state-of-theart.

show abstract

Section: High School Timetabling Problemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Hidden Markov Model Approach to the Problem of Heuristic Selection in Hyper-Heuristics with a Case Study in High School Timetabling Problems

Kheiri

Keedwell

2017

Evolutionary Computation

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Their results indicate that GAs hybridised with local search is promising. Filho et al (2001) formulated the timetabling problem as a clustering problem and applied a genetic algorithm to construct solutions to the timetabling problem of public schools in Brazil. Wilke et al (2002) proposed a hybrid genetic algorithm using multiple genetic operators and a parameter configuration strategy that randomly chooses from different options during the search process whenever the algorithm detects that no improvement can be made.…”

Section: High School Timetabling Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

A stochastic local search algorithm with adaptive acceptance for high-school timetabling

2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Automated high school timetabling is a challenging task. This problem is a well known hard computational problem which has been of interest to practitioners as well as researchers. High schools need to timetable their regular activities once per year, or even more frequently. The exact solvers may fail to find a solution for a given instance of the problem. A selection hyper-heuristic can be defined as an easy-to-implement, easy-to-maintain and effective 'heuristic to choose heuristics' to solve such computationally hard problems. This paper describes the approach of the team HySST (Hyper-heuristic Search Strategies and Timetabling) to high school timetabling which competed at the three rounds of the Third International Timetabling Competition. Despite this being the first attempt in high school timetabling, HySST generated the best new solutions for three given instances in Round 1 and gained the second place in Rounds 2 and 3 with a fairly standard stochastic search method but significantly enhanced by a selection hyper-heuristic with an adaptive acceptance mechanism.

show abstract

“…Their results indicate that GAs combined with local search is promising. Filho and Lorena (2001) [28] considered a timetabling problem as a clustering problem and applied a modified genetic algorithm, named as constructive genetic algorithm for solving timetabling problems of public schools in Brazil. Wilke et al (2002) [29] proposed a hybrid genetic algorithm using multiple repair operators and a parameter configuration strategy that operated whenever the search process stagnated.…”

Section: High-school Course Timetabling and Metaheuristic Solutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Interleaved Constructive Memetic Algorithm and its application to timetabling

Özcan

Parkes

Alkan

2012

Computers & Operations Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Timetabling problems are well known NP-hard constraint satisfaction, and real-world cases often have complicated and challenging structures. For such problems, we present a new hybrid method, "Interleaved Constructive Memetic Algorithm" (ICMA) that interleaves memetic algorithms with constructive methods. ICMA works using an active subset of all the events. Starting with a few events, in multiple construction stages ICMA increases the active set to eventually include all of them. At each stage, a memetic algorithm (MA) is applied to improve the current partial solution before the next construction step. We also describe a real-world course timetabling problem, the "Preparation School Timetabling Problem" (PSTP), which is of particular interest because it has a highly hierarchical structure arising from various organisational requirements. An important advantage of ICMA is that both the constructive heuristics and MA can be tailored to exploit such hierarchical structures. We give empirical results showing that ICMA performs better than the corresponding conventional MA on the PSTP.

show abstract

A Constructive Evolutionary Approach to School Timetabling

Cited by 32 publications

References 12 publications

A Hidden Markov Model Approach to the Problem of Heuristic Selection in Hyper-Heuristics with a Case Study in High School Timetabling Problems

A Hidden Markov Model Approach to the Problem of Heuristic Selection in Hyper-Heuristics with a Case Study in High School Timetabling Problems

A stochastic local search algorithm with adaptive acceptance for high-school timetabling

The Interleaved Constructive Memetic Algorithm and its application to timetabling

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About