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A Timeslot-Filling Heuristic Approach to Construct High-School Timetables

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Advances in Metaheuristics

Part of the book series: Operations Research/Computer Science Interfaces Series ((ORCS,volume 53))

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Abstract

This work describes an approach for creating high-school timetables. To develop and test our algorithm, we used the international, real-world instances of the Benchmarking project for (High) School Timetabling. Contrary to most other heuristic approaches, we do not try to iteratively assign single meetings (events) to timeslots. Instead, we repeatedly choose a not entirely occupied timeslot and aim at simultaneously assigning the most suitable set of meetings. To improve and diversify the solutions, a heuristic that deletes and reassigns certain timeslots, events or resources is applied and combined with a hill-climbing procedure to find suitable parameters for grading constraints. Experimental results indicate the competitiveness of this new approach.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.utwente.nl/ctit/hstt/.

  2. 2.

    http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/patat/patat-index.shtml.

  3. 3.

    http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/watt/.

  4. 4.

    http://people.brunel.ac.uk/~mastjjb/jeb/orlib/tableinfo.html.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Michael Pimmer & Günther R. Raidl

Authors
  1. Michael Pimmer
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  2. Günther R. Raidl
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Michael Pimmer or Günther R. Raidl .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. , DIEGM, University of Udine, via delle Scienze 206, Udine, 33100, Italy

    Luca Di Gaspero

  2. , DIEGM, University of Udine, via delle Scienze 206, Udine, 33100, Italy

    Andrea Schaerf

  3. , IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Avenue Franklin Roosevelt 50, Bruxelles, 1050, Belgium

    Thomas Stützle

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Pimmer, M., Raidl, G.R. (2013). A Timeslot-Filling Heuristic Approach to Construct High-School Timetables. In: Di Gaspero, L., Schaerf, A., Stützle, T. (eds) Advances in Metaheuristics. Operations Research/Computer Science Interfaces Series, vol 53. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6322-1_9

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