A Multi-Phase Hybrid Metaheuristics Approach for the Exam Timetabling

摘要

We propose a Multi-Phase Hybrid Metaheuristics approach for solving the Exam Timetabling Problem (ETP). This approach is defined with three phases: pre-processing phase, construction phase and enhancement phase. The pre-processing phase relies on our variable ordering heuristic as well as a form of transitive closure for discovering implicit constraints. The construction phase uses a variant of the Tabu Search with conflicts dictionary. The enhancement phase includes Hill Climbing (HC), Simulated Annealing (SA) and our updated version of the extended "Great Deluge" algorithm. In order to evaluate the performance of the different phases of our proposed approach, we conducted several experiments on instances taken from ITC 2007 benchmarking datasets. The results are very promising and competitive with the well known ETP solvers.