A Developmental Approach to the Uncapacitated Examination Timetabling Problem

The paper describes a new approach, based on cell biology, to the uncapacitated examination timetabling problem. This approach begins with a single cell which is developed into a fully grown organism through the processes of cell division, cell interaction and cell migration. The mature organism represents a solution to the particular timetabling problem. The paper discusses the performance of this method on the Carter set of benchmark problems. This data set is comprised of real-world timetabling problems. The results obtained using the developmental approach are compared to that obtained by other biologically inspired algorithms applied to the same set of benchmarks and the best results cited in the literature for the Carter data set.