Case-based selection of initialisation heuristics for metaheuristic examination timetabling

Abstract

Examination timetabling problems are often solved by a two-phase procedure combining a sequential construction heuristic with a metaheuristic improvement search. There can be many combinations of pairing candidate construction heuristics with a metaheuristic. Different pairings are known to produce solutions of varying quality. In this paper we propose a Case Based Reasoning methodology for selecting the pairing of an appropriate sequential construction heuristic with the Great Deluge metaheuristic. We have thoroughly tested our solution approach by using extensive computational experiments in the domain of examination timetabling, and obtained the best results on a number of benchmark problems. In this research we have addressed the research issues of the representation of timetabling problems, similarity measures for timetabling problems, and the retrieval process.