A matheuristic for exam timetabling

Exam timetabling is a tedious task faced in universities. We present a matheuristic to solve the exam timetabling problem related to the Toronto benchmark. We propose first a non-linear formulation used to find an initial feasible solution. We briefly describe a former linear formulation and introduce a new compact linear formulation. This compact formulation drastically reduces by 99% the numbers of variables and constraints. We propose a matheuristic based on both formulations to solve the problem. The approach achieves better results when compared to existing mathematical-programming-based heuristics.

[1]  Sanja Petrovic,et al.  A Novel Similarity Measure for Heuristic Selection in Examination Timetabling , 2004, PATAT.

[2]  Patric R. J. Östergård,et al.  A fast algorithm for the maximum clique problem , 2002, Discret. Appl. Math..

[3]  Gilbert Laporte,et al.  Examination Timetabling: Algorithmic Strategies and Applications , 1994 .

[4]  Edmund K. Burke,et al.  Hybridizing Integer Programming Models with an Adaptive Decomposition Approach for Exam Timetabling Problems , 2009 .

[5]  S. A. MirHassani.  Improving paper spread in examination timetables using integer programming , 2006, Appl. Math. Comput..

[6]  Giuseppe F. Italiano,et al.  Novel Local-Search-Based Approaches to University Examination Timetabling , 2008, INFORMS J. Comput..

[7]  Peter J. Stuckey,et al.  A Hybrid Algorithm for the Examination Timetabling Problem , 2002, PATAT.

[8]  Edmund K. Burke,et al.  Initialization Strategies and Diversity in Evolutionary Timetabling , 1998, Evolutionary Computation.

[9]  Bai Yang.  A New Algorithm for the Maximum Clique Problem , 2008 .

[10]  Ender Özcan,et al.  Linear Linkage Encoding in Grouping Problems: Applications on Graph Coloring and Timetabling , 2006, PATAT.

[11]  Taha Arbaoui,et al.  Preprocessing and an improved MIP model for examination timetabling , 2015, Ann. Oper. Res..

[12]  Edmund K. Burke,et al.  A new model for automated examination timetabling , 2012, Ann. Oper. Res..

[13]  Edmund K. Burke,et al.  A survey of search methodologies and automated system development for examination timetabling , 2009, J. Sched..