Abstract
In this contribution a comparative study of modern heuristics on the school timetabling problem is presented. More precisely, we investigate the application of two population-based algorithms, namely a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and an Artificial Fish Swarm (AFS), on the high school timetabling problem. In order to demonstrate their efficiency and performance, experiments with real-world input data have been performed. Both algorithms proposed manage to create feasible and efficient high school timetables, thus fulfilling adequately the timetabling needs of the respective high schools. Computational results demonstrate that both algorithms manage to reach efficient solutions, most of the times better than existing approaches applied to the same school timetabling input instances using the same evaluation criteria.
Highlights
The problem faced in this contribution belongs to the wide family of educational timetabling problems which are NP-complete in their general form [1,2]
In the current work we focus on the high school timetabling problem, which involves the weekly scheduling for all lecturers of a high school
We investigate the application of two heuristic algorithms on the Greek school timetabling problem, namely Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) [16] and Artificial Fish Swarm (AFS) [17]
Summary
The problem faced in this contribution belongs to the wide family of educational timetabling problems which are NP-complete in their general form [1,2]. In the current work we focus on the high school timetabling problem, which involves the weekly scheduling for all lecturers of a high school. The school timetabling problem requires the assignment of lectures (events) to timeslots in such a way that no teacher/class (resources) is involved in more than one lecture simultaneously, while many other significant constraints are satisfied. These constraints include both hard and soft constraints. In the respective literature many variants of the high school timetabling problem have been presented, which mainly differ due to the educational system of each country [5,6,7]. In recent years many papers have been published describing specific techniques applied to the high school timetabling problem [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15]
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