Many researchers studying examination timetabling problems focus on either benchmark problems or problems from practice encountered in their institutions. Hyperheuristics are proposed as generic optimisation methods which explore the search space of heuristics rather than direct solutions. In the present study, the performance of tournament-based hyperheuristics for the exam timetabling problem...

Timetabling is a difficult (NP-complete) problem and belongs to a general class of problems known as scheduling. Due to a variety of constraints typical in different timetabling environments, it has been difficult to develop a generic solution for timetabling. This paper is an attempt to define a generic computational model for examination timetabling for predefined constraints found in the pro...

Examination timetabling is a type of educational timetabling which is a highly challenging field for the researchers and practitioners. Examination timetabling problems require a search for the best assignment of examinations into a fixed number of time-slots possibly along with other resources, such as, a set of rooms with certain capacities, subject to a set of constraints. There are two comm...

The timetabling problem consists in fixing a sequence of meetings between teachers and students in a given period of time, satisfying a set of different constraints. There are a number of different versions of the timetabling problem. These include school timetabling (where students are grouped in classes with similar degree plans), university timetabling (where students are considered individu...

Examination timetabling is a well-studied combinatorial optimization problem. We present a new hybrid algorithm for examination timetabling, consisting of three phases: a constraint programming phase to develop an initial solution, a simulated annealing phase to improve the quality of solution, and a hill climbing phase for further improvement. The examination timetabling problem at the Univers...

This paper describes the results of a questionnaire on examination timetabling sent to the registrars of ninety five British Universities. The survey asked questions in three specific categories. Firstly, universities were asked about the nature of their examination timetabling problem: how many people, rooms, periods are involved and what difficulties are associated with the problem? Secondly,...

Scheduling exams in colleges are a complicated job that is difficult to solve conventionally. Exam timetabling one of the combinatorial optimization problems where there no exact algorithm can answer problem with optimum solution and minimum time possible. This study investigated University Toronto benchmark dataset, which provides 13 real instances regarding scheduling course from various inst...

When timetabling experts are faced with a new timetabling problem, they usually develop a very specialised and optimised solution for this new underlying problem. One disadvantage of this strategy is that even slight changes of the problem description often cause a complete redesign of data structures and algorithms. Furthermore, other timetabling problems cannot be fit to the data structures p...