Abstract
This work presents a local search approach to the High School Timetabling Problem. The addressed timetabling model is the one stated in the Third International Timetabling Competition (ITC 2011), which considered many instances from educational institutions around the world and attracted seventeen competitors. Our team, named GOAL (Group of Optimization and Algorithms), developed a solver built upon the Kingston High School Timetabling Engine. Several neighborhood structures were developed and used in a hybrid metaheuristic based on Simulated Annealing and Iterated Local Search. The developed algorithm was the winner of the competition and produced the best known solutions for almost all instances.
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Notes
http://www.utwente.nl/ctit/hstt/, accessed on 30th April, 2013.
http://www.idsia.ch/Files/ttcomp2002/, accessed on 30th April, 2013.
http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/, accessed on 30th April, 2013.
http://www.utwente.nl/ctit/hstt/itc2011/welcome/, accessed on 30th April, 2013.
http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/it/~jeff/hseval.cgi, accessed on April, 2013.
http://www.utwente.nl/ctit/hstt/archives/XHSTT-2012, accessed on April, 2013.
On instances AustraliaSAHS96 and AustraliaTES99, the initial solution generated by KHE was better than the provided solution, so KHE was used in these cases.
100 neighbors were considered in our tests.
Excluding the Brazilian instances, in which we could not compete.
We would like to highlight that for some of these instance there isn’t a known feasible solution yet.
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Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge FAPEMIG (Grant APQ-04611-10) and CNPq (Grant 552289/2011-6) for supporting the development of this research.
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da Fonseca, G.H.G., Santos, H.G., Toffolo, T.Â.M. et al. GOAL solver: a hybrid local search based solver for high school timetabling. Ann Oper Res 239, 77–97 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-014-1685-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-014-1685-4