Hybrid variable neighbourhood approaches to university exam timetabling

In this paper we propose a variable neighbourhood search (VNS) meta-heuristic [25] for the university examination timetabling problem. In addition to a basic VNS method, we introduce a variety of variants which further improve the quality of the results produced by the technique. We also aim to demonstrate that the proposed technique is capable of producing high quality solutions across a wide range of benchmark problems. This high level of generality is one of the key features of the VNS technique. In particular, its combination with a genetic algorithm which intelligently selects which neighbourhoods to use for a given problem is shown to