Construction of examination timetables based on ordering heuristics

—In this paper, we combine graph coloring heuristics, namely largest degree and saturation degree with the concept of a heuristic modifier under the framework of squeaky wheel optimization for solving a set of examination timetabling problems. Both heuristics interact intelligently and adaptively determine the ordering of examinations to be processed during each of iteration. A variety of approaches based on different heuristics and their combinations are investigated. Experimental results on a set of benchmark problems show that the proposed approaches can produce high quality solutions comparable to the other constructive methods. For one problem instance, the best results based on constructive heuristics provided in the literature are improved by one of the proposed methods. We conclude that our approach is simple, yet effective. Keywords-Examination timetabling; constructive heuristic; priority

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ISCIS
• Authors: Syariza Abdul Rahman, Andrzej Bargiela, Edmund K. Burke, Ender Özcan, Barry McCollum
• Keywords: Constructive Heuristic, Graph Coloring Heuristics, Heuristics, Information Management, ISCIS 2009