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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - A stochastic local search algorithm with adaptive acceptance for high-school timetabling
AU - Kheiri, Ahmed
AU - Özcan, Ender
AU - Parkes, Andrew J.
N1 - The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10479-014-1660-0
PY - 2016/4/1
Y1 - 2016/4/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Hyper-heuristic
KW - Restart
KW - Scheduling
KW - Stochastic local search
KW - Timetabling
U2 - 10.1007/s10479-014-1660-0
DO - 10.1007/s10479-014-1660-0
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:84902707120
VL - 239
SP - 135
EP - 151
JO - Annals of Operations Research
JF - Annals of Operations Research
SN - 0254-5330
IS - 1
ER -