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A Tabu Search Hyper-heuristic Approach to the Examination Timetabling Problem at the MARA University of Technology

  • Conference paper
Book cover Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling V (PATAT 2004)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 3616))

Abstract

In this paper we introduce an examination timetabling problem from the MARA University of Technology (UiTM). UiTM is the largest university in Malaysia. It has 13 branch campuses and offers 144 programmes, delivered by 18 faculties. This dataset differs from the others reported in the literature due to weekend constraints that have to be observed. We present their examination timetabling problem with respect to its size, complexity and constraints. We analyse their real-world data, and produce solutions utilising a tabu-search-based hyper-heuristic. Since this is a new dataset, and no solutions have been published in the literature, we can only compare our results with an existing manual solution. We find that our solution is at least 80% better with respect to proximity cost. We also compare our approach against a benchmark dataset and show that our method is able to produce good quality results.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning (ASAP) Research Group, School of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Nottingham, Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road, Nottingham, NG8 1BB, UK

    Graham Kendall

  2. Faculty of Information Technology and Quantitative Sciences, MARA University of Technology, 40450, Shah Alam, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia

    Naimah Mohd Hussin

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  1. Graham Kendall
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  2. Naimah Mohd Hussin
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning Group, School of Computer Science & IT, University of Nottingham, NG8 1BB, Nottingham, UK

    Edmund Burke

  2. Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, 15213, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Michael Trick

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Kendall, G., Hussin, N.M. (2005). A Tabu Search Hyper-heuristic Approach to the Examination Timetabling Problem at the MARA University of Technology. In: Burke, E., Trick, M. (eds) Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling V. PATAT 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3616. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11593577_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11593577_16

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-30705-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32421-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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