Abstract
The precise nature of the examination timetabling problem differs from institution to institution. Thus any general solution method must be suitably flexible and this paper is concerned with finding robust cooling schedules for a simulated annealing based approach. The motivation is TISSUE, a timetabling package developed and used successfully at Swansea University. Previous work has concentrated on the problem specific decisions, and with very slow cooling, TISSUE performs well on a variety of real life test data. Here, we concentrate on automating the cooling schedule with the objective of improving running times without sacrificing solution quality. The results of extensive tests on a variety of data sets demonstrated that adaptive schedules were flexible enough to produce high quality solutions with a reduction in solution time.
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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Thompson, J., Dowsland, K.A. (1996). General cooling schedules for a simulated annealing based timetabling system. In: Burke, E., Ross, P. (eds) Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling. PATAT 1995. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1153. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61794-9_70
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61794-9_70
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