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 ...

The 2nd International Timetabling Competition (ITC2007) is made up of three tracks; one on examination timetabling and two on course timetabling. This paper describes the examination timetabling track introduced as part of the competition. Both the model and the datasets are based on current real world instances introduced by EventMAP Limited. It is hoped that the interest generated as part of ...

This paper presents a genetic programming (GP) hyper-heuristic approach that optimizes a search space of functions to assess the difficulty of allocating an examination during the timetable construction process. Each function is a heuristic combination of lowlevel construction heuristics combined by logical operators. The approach is tested on a set of five benchmark problems of varying difficu...

This paper presents a real-world examination timetabling problem from Universiti Malaysia Pahang (UMP), Malaysia. The problem involves assigning invigilators to examination rooms. This problem has received less attention than the examination timetabling problem from the research community partly because no data sets are available in the literature. In modelling, and solving, this problem we ass...

The work presented in this paper could be thought of as a case based hyper-heuristic approach for examination timetabling problems. A hyper-heuristic can be taken to be an automated approach to choose heuristics. Heuristics and meta-heuristics are employed in this capacity in [1] and [2]. In this paper the case-based paradigm is explored as a heuristic selector for examination timetabling probl...

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...

Constructing examination timetable for higher educational institutions is a very complex work due to the complexity of timetabling problems. The objective of examination timetabling problem is to satisfy the hard constraints and minimize the violations of soft constraints. In this paper, a tabu-based memetic approach has been applied and evaluated against the latest methodologies in the literat...

Examination timetabling problem is an optimization problem which consists in assigning a set of exams to a set of contiguous time slot, satisfying a set of constraints. The problem falls in the category of the NP-Complete problems and is usually tackled using heuristic methods. In this paper we describe a solution algorithm and its implementation based on the graph heuristics and the evolutiona...

This paper presents the results of a study conducted to investigate the use of genetic algorithms (GAs) as a means of inducing solutions to the examination timetabling problem (ETP). This study differs from previous efforts applying genetic algorithms to this domain in that firstly it takes a two-phased approach to the problem which focuses on producing timetables that meet the hard constraints...

Timetabling problems emerge in many variations [9], depending on the nature of the assignments involved (exam timetabling, course timetabling, school timetabling and others), as well as, the characteristics of the institution and the set of constraints assumed. In this communication we focus on a particular school timetabling problem the Class/Teacher Timetabling Problem (CTTP) that will be des...