Abstract
This paper presents a new single-parameter local search heuristic named step counting hill climbing algorithm (SCHC). It is a very simple method in which the current cost serves as an acceptance bound for a number of consecutive steps. This is the only parameter in the method that should be set up by the user. Furthermore, the counting of steps can be organised in different ways; therefore, the proposed method can generate a large number of variants and also extensions. In this paper, we investigate the behaviour of the three basic variants of SCHC on the university exam timetabling problem. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method shares the main properties with the late acceptance hill climbing method, namely its convergence time is proportional to the value of its parameter and a non-linear rescaling of a problem does not affect its search performance. However, our new method has two additional advantages: a more flexible acceptance condition and better overall performance. In this study, we compare the new method with late acceptance hill climbing, simulated annealing and great deluge algorithm. The SCHC has shown the strongest performance on the most of our benchmark problems used.
Highlights
A single-parameter local search metaheuristic called late acceptance hill climbing algorithm (LAHC) was proposed by Burke and Bykov (2008)
We proposed a new local search algorithm: step counting hill climbing algorithm (SCHC) and investigated its behaviour
The exam timetabling problem was chosen as benchmark
Summary
A single-parameter local search metaheuristic called late acceptance hill climbing algorithm (LAHC) was proposed by Burke and Bykov (2008). It was found that despite apparent similarities with other local search metaheuristics such as simulated annealing (SA) and great deluge algorithm (GDA), LAHC had the underlying distinction, namely it did not require a guiding mechanism like, for example, cooling schedule in SA. This provided the method with effectiveness and reliability. This method was employed in entry algorithms by two research groups (J17 and S5) in ROADEF/EURO Challenge 2012 (http://challenge.roadef.org/2012/en/). The initial study of the late acceptance hill climbing algorithm was done on the exam timetabling problems (Burke and Bykov 2008).
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