A Memetic Algorithm for University Exam Timetabling

The scheduling of exams in institutions of higher education is known to be a highly constrained problem. The advent of modularity in many institutions in the UK has resulted in a significant increase in its complexity, imposing even more difficulties on university administrators who must find a solution, often without any computer aid. Of the many methods that have been applied to solving the problem automatically, evolutionary techniques have shown much promise due to their general purpose optimisation capabilities. However, it has also been found that hybrid evolutionary methods can yield even better results. In this paper we present such a hybrid approach in the form of an evolutionary algorithm that incorporates local search methods (known as a memetic algorithm).