Cyclic transfers in school timetabling

In this paper we propose a neighbourhood structure based on sequential/cyclic moves and a cyclic transfer algorithm for the high school timetabling problem. This method enables execution of complex moves for improving an existing solution, while dealing with the challenge of exploring the neighbourhood efficiently. An improvement graph is used in which certain negative cycles correspond to the neighbours; these cycles are explored using a recursive method. We address the problem of applying large neighbourhood structure methods on problems where the cost function is not exactly the sum of independent cost functions, as it is in the set partitioning problem. For computational experiments we use four real world data sets for high school timetabling in the Netherlands and England.We present results of the cyclic transfer algorithm with different settings on these data sets. The costs decrease by 8–28% if we use the cyclic transfers for local optimization compared to our initial solutions. The quality of the best initial solutions are comparable to the solutions found in practice by timetablers

Cyclic transfers in school timetabling

In this paper we propose a neighbourhood structure based\ud on sequential/cyclic moves and a Cyclic Transfer algorithm for the high school timetabling problem. This method enables execution of complex moves for improving an existing solution, while dealing with the challenge of exploring the neighbourhood efficiently. An improvement graph is used in which certain negative cycles correspond to the neighbours; these cycles are explored using a recursive method. We address the problem of applying large neighbourhood structure methods on problems where the cost function is not exactly the sum of independent cost functions, as it is in the set partitioning problem. For computational experiments we use four real world datasets for high school timetabling in the Netherlands and England. We present results of the cyclic transfer algorithm with different settings on these datasets. The costs decrease by 8% to 28% if we use the cyclic transfers for local optimization compared to our initial solutions. The quality of the best initial solutions are comparable to the solutions found in practice by timetablers

Solving the course scheduling problem by constraint programming and simulated annealing

Thesis (Master)--Izmir Institute of Technology, Computer Engineering, Izmir, 2008Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 87-62)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and Englishix, 80 leavesIn this study it has been tackled the NP-complete problem of academic class scheduling (or timetabling). The aim of this thesis is finding a feasible solution for Computer Engineering Department of İzmir Institute of Technology. Hence, a solution method for course timetabling is presented in this thesis, consisting of two phases: a constraint programming phase to provide an initial solution and a simulated annealing phase with different neighbourhood searching algorithms. When the experimental data are obtained it is noticed that according to problem structure, whether the problem is tightened or loosen constrained, the performance of a hybrid approach can change. These different behaviours of the approach are demonstrated by two different timetabling problem instances. In addition to all these, the neighbourhood searching algorithms used in the simulated annealing technique are tested in different combinations and their performances are presented

The Application of Late Acceptance Heuristic Method for the Tanzanian High School Timetabling Problem

High School timetabling is the problem of scheduling lessons of different subjects and teachers to timeslots within a week, while satisfying a set of constraints which are classified into hard and soft constraints. This problem is different from university course timetabling problem because of the differences in structures including classroom allocations and grouping of subject combinations. Given the scarce education resources in developing countries, high school timetabling problem plays a very important role in optimizing the use of meager resources and therefore contribute to improvement of quality of education. The problem has attracted attention of many researchers around the world; however, very little has been done in Tanzania. This paper presents a solution algorithm known as Late Acceptance heuristic for the problem and compares results with previous work on Simulated Annealing and Great Deluge Algorithm for three schools in Dar es Salaam Tanzania. It is concluded that Late Acceptance heuristic gives results which are similar to the previous two algorithms but performs better in terms of time saving. Keywords: Late Acceptance; High School Timetabling; Combinatorial Optimization; Heuristics; NP-Har

Design, Engineering, and Experimental Analysis of a Simulated Annealing Approach to the Post-Enrolment Course Timetabling Problem

The post-enrolment course timetabling (PE-CTT) is one of the most studied timetabling problems, for which many instances and results are available. In this work we design a metaheuristic approach based on Simulated Annealing to solve the PE-CTT. We consider all the different variants of the problem that have been proposed in the literature and we perform a comprehensive experimental analysis on all the public instances available. The outcome is that our solver, properly engineered and tuned, performs very well on all cases, providing the new best known results on many instances and state-of-the-art values for the others