A stochastic local search algorithm with adaptive acceptance for high-school timetabling

Automating high school timetabling is a challenging task. This problem is a well known hard computational problem which has been of interest to practitioners as well as researchers. High schools need to timetable their regular activities once per year, or even more frequently. The exact solvers migh...

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Main Authors: Kheiri, Ahmed, Özcan, Ender, Parkes, Andrew J.
Format: Article
Published: Springer 2014
Subjects:
Online Access:https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/32184/
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author Kheiri, Ahmed
Özcan, Ender
Parkes, Andrew J.
author_facet Kheiri, Ahmed
Özcan, Ender
Parkes, Andrew J.
author_sort Kheiri, Ahmed
building Nottingham Research Data Repository
collection Online Access
description Automating high school timetabling is a challenging task. This problem is a well known hard computational problem which has been of interest to practitioners as well as researchers. High schools need to timetable their regular activities once per year, or even more frequently. The exact solvers might fail to find a solution for a given instance of the problem. A selection hyper-heuristic can be defined as an easy-to-implement, easy-to-maintain and effective 'heuristic to choose heuristics' to solve such computationally hard problems. This paper describes the approach of the team hyper-heuristic search strategies and timetabling (HySST) to high school timetabling which competed in all three rounds of the third international timetabling competition. HySST generated the best new solutions for three given instances in Round 1 and gained the second place in Rounds 2 and 3. It achieved this by using a fairly standard stochastic search method but significantly enhanced by a selection hyper-heuristic with an adaptive acceptance mechanism. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York.
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spelling nottingham-321842020-05-04T16:49:11Z https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/32184/ A stochastic local search algorithm with adaptive acceptance for high-school timetabling Kheiri, Ahmed Özcan, Ender Parkes, Andrew J. Automating high school timetabling is a challenging task. This problem is a well known hard computational problem which has been of interest to practitioners as well as researchers. High schools need to timetable their regular activities once per year, or even more frequently. The exact solvers might fail to find a solution for a given instance of the problem. A selection hyper-heuristic can be defined as an easy-to-implement, easy-to-maintain and effective 'heuristic to choose heuristics' to solve such computationally hard problems. This paper describes the approach of the team hyper-heuristic search strategies and timetabling (HySST) to high school timetabling which competed in all three rounds of the third international timetabling competition. HySST generated the best new solutions for three given instances in Round 1 and gained the second place in Rounds 2 and 3. It achieved this by using a fairly standard stochastic search method but significantly enhanced by a selection hyper-heuristic with an adaptive acceptance mechanism. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York. Springer 2014-06-22 Article PeerReviewed Kheiri, Ahmed, Özcan, Ender and Parkes, Andrew J. (2014) A stochastic local search algorithm with adaptive acceptance for high-school timetabling. Annals of Operations Research, 239 (1). pp. 135-151. ISSN 1572-9338 timetabling stochastic local search hyper-heuristic restart scheduling http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10479-014-1660-0 doi:10.1007/s10479-014-1660-0 doi:10.1007/s10479-014-1660-0
spellingShingle timetabling
stochastic local search
hyper-heuristic
restart
scheduling
Kheiri, Ahmed
Özcan, Ender
Parkes, Andrew J.
A stochastic local search algorithm with adaptive acceptance for high-school timetabling
title A stochastic local search algorithm with adaptive acceptance for high-school timetabling
title_full A stochastic local search algorithm with adaptive acceptance for high-school timetabling
title_fullStr A stochastic local search algorithm with adaptive acceptance for high-school timetabling
title_full_unstemmed A stochastic local search algorithm with adaptive acceptance for high-school timetabling
title_short A stochastic local search algorithm with adaptive acceptance for high-school timetabling
title_sort stochastic local search algorithm with adaptive acceptance for high-school timetabling
topic timetabling
stochastic local search
hyper-heuristic
restart
scheduling
url https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/32184/
https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/32184/
https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/32184/