Abstract
Timetable construction is extremely difficult and time- consuming in large high-schools and universities. Even latest high-quality heuristic repair methods leave constraint violations to be fixed manually. This paper describes two improvements, initialization and repair. The improved initialization method applies a heuristic repair method whenever inconsistencies are found during the construction. The improved repair method escapes from local minima by moving two lectures at once in a way similar to the way billiard balls move. Evaluating these methods by using them on real high-school and university timetabling problems showed that they left between 30% and 97% fewer violations than a previous method left.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Carter, M.W.: A survey of practical applications of examination timetabling algorithms. Operations Research 34(2), 193–202 (1986)
Corne, D., Fang, H.L., Mellish, C.: Solving the modular exam scheduling problem with GAs. In: Proceedings of the 1993 International Conference on Industrial and Engineering Application of AI and ES (1993)
Feldman, R., Golumbic, M.C.: Constraint satisfiability algorithms for interactive student scheduling. In: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1010–1016 (1989)
Minton, S., Johnston, M.D., Philips, A.B., Laird, P.: Minimizing conflicts: A heuristic repair method for constraint satisfaction and scheduling problems. Artificial Intelligence 58, 160–205 (1992)
Schaerf, A.: Tabu search techniques for large high-school timetabling problems. In: AAAI 1996, pp. 363–368 (1996)
Schaerf, A.: Combining local search and look-ahead for scheduling and constraint satisfaction problems. In: IJCAI 1997, pp. 1254–1259 (1997)
Yoshikawa, M., Kaneko, K., Nomura, Y., Watanabe, M.: A constraint-based approach to high-school timetabling problems: A case study. In: AAAI 1994, pp. 1111–1116 (1994)
Yoshikawa, M., Kaneko, K., Yamanouchi, T., Watanabe, M.: A constraint-based high school scheduling system. IEEE Expert 11(1), 63–72 (1996)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kaneko, K., Yoshikawa, M., Nakakuki, Y. (1999). Improving a Heuristic Repair Method for Large-Scale School Timetabling Problems. In: Jaffar, J. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming – CP’99. CP 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1713. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-48085-3_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-48085-3_20
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-66626-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48085-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive