Abstract
Constructing examination timetable for higher educational institutions is a very complex task due to the complexity of the issues involved. The objective of examination timetabling problem is to satisfy the hard constraints and minimize the violations of soft constraints. In this work, a tabu-based memetic approach has been applied and evaluated against the latest methodologies in the literature on standard benchmark problems. The approach hybridizes the concepts of tabu search and memetic algorithms. A tabu list is used to penalise neighbourhood structures that are unable to generate better solutions after the crossover and mutation operators have been applied to the selected solutions from the population pool. We demonstrate that our approach is able to enhance the quality of the solutions by carefully selecting the effective neighbourhood structures. Hence, some best known results have been obtained.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Cheong, C.Y., Tan, K.C., Veeravalli, B.: Solving the exam timetabling problem via a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm: A more general approach. In: IEEE symposium on computational intelligence in scheduling, Honolulu, HI, USA, pp. 165–172 (2007)
Burke, E.K., Bykov, Y., Newall, J.P., Petrovic, S.: A time-predefined local search approach to exam timetabling problem. IIE Transactions 36(6), 509–528 (2004)
Caramia, M., Dell’Olmo, P., Italiano, G.F.: New algorithms for examination timetabling. In: Näher, S., Wagner, D. (eds.) WAE 2000. LNCS, vol. 1982, pp. 230–241. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Carter, M.W., Laporte, G., Lee, S.Y.: Examination Timetabling: Algorithmic Strategies and Applications. Journal of the Operational Research Society 47, 373–383 (1996)
Ct, P., Wong, T., Sabourin, R.: A hybrid multi-objective evolutionary algorithm for the uncapacitated exam proximity problem. In: Burke, E.K., Trick, M.A. (eds.) PATAT 2004. LNCS, vol. 3616, pp. 294–312. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Qu, R., Burke, E.K., McCollum, B., Merlot, L.T.G.: A survey of search methodologies and automated system development for examination timetabling. Journal of Scheduling 12, 55–89 (2009)
Abdullah, S., Turabieh, H.: Generating university course timetable using genetic algorithm and local search. In: Proceeding of the 3rd International Conference on Hybrid Information Technology, pp. 254–260 (2008)
Abdullah, S., Burke, E.K., McCollum, B.: Using a Randomised Iterative Improvement Algorithm with Composite Neighbourhood Structures for University Course Timetabling. In: Metaheuristics: Progress in complex systems optimization (Operations Research / Computer Science Interfaces Series), ch. 8. Springer, Heidelberg (2007) ISBN:978-0-387-71919-1
Abdullah, S., Turabeih, H., McCollum, B.: A hybridization of electromagnetic like mechanism and great deluge for examination timetabling problems. In: Blesa, M.J., Blum, C., Di Gaspero, L., Roli, A., Sampels, M., Schaerf, A. (eds.) HM 2009. LNCS, vol. 5818, pp. 60–72. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Abdullah, S., Ahmadi, S., Burke, E.K., Dror, M.: Investigating Ahuja-Orlin’s large neighbourhood search approach for examination timetabling. OR Spectrum 29(2), 351–372 (2007)
Petrovic, S., Burke, E.K.: University timetabling. In: Leung, J. (ed.) Handbook of Scheduling: Algorithms, Models, and Performance Analysis, ch. 45. CRC Press, Boca Raton (April 2004)
Yang, Y., Petrovic, S.: A novel similarity measure for heuristic selection in examination timetabling. In: Burke, E.K., Trick, M.A. (eds.) PATAT 2004. LNCS, vol. 3616, pp. 247–269. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Abdullah, S., Turabieh, H., McCollum, B., McMullan, P. (2010). A Tabu-Based Memetic Approach for Examination Timetabling Problems. In: Yu, J., Greco, S., Lingras, P., Wang, G., Skowron, A. (eds) Rough Set and Knowledge Technology. RSKT 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6401. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16248-0_78
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16248-0_78
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-16247-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-16248-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)