The main goal of this paper is to attempt an unbiased comparison of the performance of straightforward implementations of five different metaheuristics on a university course timetabling problem. In particular, the metaheuristics under consideration are Evolutionary Algorithms, Ant Colony Optimization, Iterated Local Search, Simulated Annealing, and Tabu Search. To attempt fairness, the impleme...

Timetabling problems are well known complicated constraint satisfaction problems. A new realworld course timetabling problem is described in this study. The difficulty in approximating to an optimal solution in a reasonable time increases for the large problem instances regardless of the algorithm used. An incremental strategy that aims to relieve this difficulty to some extent combined with a ...

Vertex colouring is a well-known problem in combinatorial optimisation, whose alternative integer programming formulations have recently attracted considerable attention. This paper briefly surveys seven known formulations of vertex colouring and introduces a new formulation of vertex colouring using a suitable clique partition of the graph. This formulation is applicable in timetabling applica...

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 multip...

Railway timetabling is an important process in train service provision as it matches the transportation demand with the infrastructure capacity while customer satisfaction is also considered. It is a multi-objective optimisation problem, in which a feasible solution, rather than the optimal one, is usually taken in practice because of the time constraint. The quality of services may suffer as a...

Researchers are turning more and more to evolutionary algorithms (EAs) as a exible and eeective technique for addressing timetabling problems in their institutions. We present a class of specialised mutation operators for use in conjunction with the commonly employed penalty-function based EA approach to timetabling which shows signiicant improvement in performance over a range of real and real...

Today, University Timetabling problems are occurred annually and they are often hard and time consuming to solve. This paper describes Hyper Heuristics (HH) method based on Great Deluge (GD) and its variants for solving large, highly constrained timetabling problems from different domains. Generally, in hyper heuristic framework, there are two main stages: heuristic selection and move acceptanc...

A two phased approach incorporating the extended great deluge technique is detailed in relation to the Examination Timetabling Problem as described in the 2 International Timetabling Competition (ITC2007). The approach proves to be both robust and general. Robust in the sense that it is capable of producing six of the best results published in literature so far on the benchmark datasets and gen...

The course timetabling problem is one of the most difficult combinatorial problems, it requires the assignment of a fixed number of subjects into a number of time slots minimizing the number of student conflicts. This article presents a comparison between state-of-the-art hyper-heuristics and a newly proposed iterated variable neighborhood descent algorithm when solving the course timetabling p...

In this paper, we introduce tracks. A track is a global constraint for parallelizing the execution of task sets in non-preemptive scheduling. We give algorithms for bound as well as for domain reasoning, we propose applications in school timetabling, and we report results of a large-scale empirical study. Section 2 introduces concepts and notations we rely on. Section 3 defines tracks in terms ...