A comparative study of hyper-heuristics for solving the school timetabling problem

Hyper-heuristics have proven to be an effective means of obtaining generalized solutions to optimization problems. One such domain in which they have been a success is educational timetabling. However, all the research in this area has focused on university course and examination timetabling. This paper is amongst the first to examine the use of hyper-heuristics to solve the school timetabling problem. The paper compares the performance of a selection constructive hyper-heuristic, a generation constructive hyper-heuristic, a selection perturbative hyper-heuristic and a hybrid hyper-heuristic combining a generation constructive hyper-heuristic and a selection perturbative hyper-heuristic, in solving the school timetabling problem. Each of the hyper-heuristics employs an evolutionary algorithm to search the heuristic space. All four hyper-heuristics were applied to solving the five problems of differing difficulty in the Abramson benchmark set. The selection perturbative hyper-heuristic was found to produce the best results for the all the problems in the benchmark set.

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