School Timetables: A Case Study in Simulated Annealing

This paper concerns the use of simulated annealing as an optimisation procedure for solving the school timetabling and related scheduling problems. It describes the basic algorithm and then gives details of the constraints required to. solve practical problems. Because annealing is a slow procedure, a special purpose computer architecture has been built which runs the algorithm two orders of magnitude faster than conventional workstations and super computers. The paper describes the details of this architecture. Some results are presented which compare the effectiveness of simulated annealing against a commercially available heuristic on very complex randomly generated data.

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