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Late acceptance hill-climbing for high school timetabling

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Abstract

The application of the Late Acceptance Hill-Climbing (LAHC) to solve the High School Timetabling Problem is the subject of this manuscript. The original algorithm and two variants proposed here are tested jointly with other state-of-art methods to solve the instances proposed in the Third International Timetabling Competition. Following the same rules of the competition, the LAHC-based algorithms noticeably outperformed the winning methods. These results, and reports from the literature, suggest that the LAHC is a reliable method that can compete with the most employed local search algorithms.

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Notes

  1. We denote by \(N_k(s)\) the subset of \(N_k(s)\) involving only moves of type k.

  2. http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/it/~jeff/hseval.cgi.

  3. Code, solutions and reports are available at http://www.goal.ufop.br/softwares/hstt.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Electrical Engineering Department, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Av. Antônio Carlos 6627, Belo Horizonte, MG, 31270-901, Brazil

    George H. G. Fonseca & Eduardo G. Carrano

  2. Department of Computing, Federal University of Ouro Preto, St. Diogo de Vasconcelos 328, Ouro Preto, MG, 35400-000, Brazil

    Haroldo G. Santos

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  1. George H. G. Fonseca
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  2. Haroldo G. Santos
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  3. Eduardo G. Carrano
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Correspondence to George H. G. Fonseca.

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Fonseca, G.H.G., Santos, H.G. & Carrano, E.G. Late acceptance hill-climbing for high school timetabling. J Sched 19, 453–465 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10951-015-0458-5

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