A Novel Similarity Measure for Heuristic Selection in Examination Timetabling.pdfVIP

A Novel Similarity Measure For Heuristic Selection In Examination Timetabling Yong Yang and Sanja Petrovic School of Computer Science and Information Technology, The University of Nottingham Nottingham, NG8 1BB, UK {yxy, sxp}@cs.nott.ac.uk Abstract. Metaheuristic approaches to examination timetabling problems are usually split up into two phases: initialisation phase in which a heuristic is em- ployed to construct an initial solution and improvement phase which employs a metaheuristic. Different hybridisations of metaheuristics with sequential heuris- tics are known to lead to solutions of different quality. A Case Based Reasoning CBR methodology has been developed for selecting an appropriate hybridsation of Great Deluge metaheuristic with a sequential construction heuristic. In this paper we propose a new similarity measure between two timetabling problems that is based on fuzzy sets. The experiments were performed on a number of real-world problems and the results were also compared with other state-of-the- art methods. The results obtained show the effectiveness of the developed CBR system. 1 Introduction Examination timetabling is an important and difficult task for educational institutions since it requires expensive human and computer resources and has to be solved sev- eral times every year. Timetabling can be defined to be the problem of allocating a set of examinations into a given set of classrooms over a limited number of time periods in such a way as to generate no conflicts between any two examinations. For example, no student should be required to attend two examinations at the same time and no student should have