A review of hyper-heuristics for educational timetabling

Abstract

Educational timetabling problems, namely, university examination timetabling, university course timetabling and school timetabling, are combinatorial optimization problems requiring the allocation of resources so as to satisfy a specified set of constraints. Hyper-heuristics have been successfully applied to a variety of combinatorial optimization problems. This is a rapidly growing field which aims at providing generalized solutions to combinatorial optimization problems by exploring a heuristic space instead of a solution space. From the research conducted thus far it is evident that hyper-heuristics are effective at solving educational timetabling problems and have the potential of advancing this field by providing a generalized solution to educational timetabling as a whole. Given this, the paper provides an overview and critical analysis of hyper-heuristics for educational timetabling and proposes future research directions, focusing on using hyper-heuristics to provide a generalized solution to educational timetabling.