A Novel Similarity Measure for Heuristic Selection in Examination Timetabling

Metaheuristic approaches to examination timetabling problems are usually split into two phases: an initialisation phase in which a sequential graph colouring heuristic is employed to construct an initial solution and an improvement phase in which the initial solution is gradually improved. Different hybridisations of metaheuristics with sequential heuristics are known to lead to solutions of different quality. A Case Based Reasoning (CBR) methodology has been developed for selecting an appropriate sequential construction heuristic for hybridisation with the Great Deluge metaheuristic. In this paper we propose a new similarity measure between two timetabling problems that is based on fuzzy sets. The experiments were performed on a number of real-world benchmark problems and the results were also compared with other state-of-the-art methods. The results obtained show the effectiveness of the developed CBR system.

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