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

Tabu search algorithms for job-shop problems with a single transport robot

We consider a generalized job-shop problem where the jobs additionally have to be transported between the machines by a single transport robot. Besides transportation times for the jobs, empty moving times for the robot are taken into account. The objective is to determine a schedule with minimal makespan. \u

Parallel patterns determination in solving cyclic flow shop problem with setups

© 2017 Archives of Control Sciences 2017. The subject of this work is the new idea of blocks for the cyclic flow shop problem with setup times, using multiple patterns with different sizes determined for each machine constituting optimal schedule of cities for the traveling salesman problem (TSP). We propose to take advantage of the Intel Xeon Phi parallel computing environment during so-called 'blocks' determination basing on patterns, in effect significantly improving the quality of obtained results

Makespan Minimization in Job Shop Scheduling

In industries, the completion time of job problems in the manufacturing unit has risen significantly. In several types of current study, the job's completion time, or makespan, is reduced by taking straight paths, which is time-consuming. In this paper, we used an Improved Ant Colony Optimization and Tabu Search (ACOTS) algorithm to solve this problem by precisely defining the fault occurrence location in order to rollback. We have used a short-term memory-based rollback recovery strategy to minimise the job's completion time by rolling back to its own short-term memory. The recent movements in Tabu quest are visited using short term memory. As compared to the ACO algorithm, our proposed ACOTS-Cmax solution is more efficient and takes less time to complete

A Component Based Heuristic Search Method with Evolutionary Eliminations

Nurse rostering is a complex scheduling problem that affects hospital personnel on a daily basis all over the world. This paper presents a new component-based approach with evolutionary eliminations, for a nurse scheduling problem arising at a major UK hospital. The main idea behind this technique is to decompose a schedule into its components (i.e. the allocated shift pattern of each nurse), and then to implement two evolutionary elimination strategies mimicking natural selection and natural mutation process on these components respectively to iteratively deliver better schedules. The worthiness of all components in the schedule has to be continuously demonstrated in order for them to remain there. This demonstration employs an evaluation function which evaluates how well each component contributes towards the final objective. Two elimination steps are then applied: the first elimination eliminates a number of components that are deemed not worthy to stay in the current schedule; the second elimination may also throw out, with a low level of probability, some worthy components. The eliminated components are replenished with new ones using a set of constructive heuristics using local optimality criteria. Computational results using 52 data instances demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach in solving real-world problems.Comment: 27 pages, 4 figure