Selection mechanisms in memory consideration for examination timetabling with harmony search

In this paper, three selection mechanisms in memory consideration operator for Examination Timetabling Problem with Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA) are investigated: Random memory consideration which uses a random selection mechanism, global-best memory consideration which uses a selection mechanism inspired by a global best concept of Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO), and Roulette-Wheel memory consideration which uses the survival for the fittest principle. The HSA with each proposed memory consideration operator is evaluated against a de facto dataset defined by Carter et al., (1996). The results suggest that the HSA with Roulette-Wheel memory consideration can produce good quality solutions. The Results are also compared with those obtained by 6 comparative methods that used Carter dataset demonstrating that the proposed method is able to obtain viable results with some best solutions for two testing datasets.

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