A Three Phase Heuristic for Examination Timetabling Problem

As part of timetabling problem, examination timetabling problem (ExTP) concerns with assigning a set of exams to appropriate time and room. As with any other timetabling problems, it is an NP-complete problem, therefore no exact solution available for most of the problems. In this paper we proposed the deployment of three heuristics in an attempt to find feasible solutions with minimum number of soft constraint violations. First, a constructive heuristic is executed to find an initial feasible solution followed by a mechanism to find promising regions. The regions are then exploited using an intensive local search heuristic to find even better solutions. This method are tested on a popular examination timetabling problem (ExTP). The approach shows a reliable performance on the dataset and comparing to state of the art results, this approach contribute to improve the results in many instances.

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