Elitist-Ant System Metaheuristic for ITC 2021—Sports Timetabling

Abstract

AbstractTimetabling problem is one of the most difficult operational tasks and an important step in raising the industrial productivity, capability, and capacity. Such tasks are usually tackled using metaheuristics techniques that provide an intelligent way of suggesting solutions or decision making. Swarm intelligence techniques including ant systems have proved to be effective examples. Different recent experiments showed that ant system algorithms are reliable for timetabling in many discrete-events applications such as educational and personnel timetabling, job and machine scheduling, and other similar aspects. However, obtaining an optimal solution is extremely difficult but obtaining a near-optimal solution using metaheuristic algorithms is possible. This research paper seeks the enhancement of ant system algorithm for an efficient timetabling task. This algorithm aims to generate feasible and high-quality timetables via minimizing constraints violations in a reasonable execution time. This enhanced version is a hybrid elitist-ant system metaheuristic which is tested on a round-robin tournament known as the international timetabling competition-2021 dedicated for sports timetabling. The competition includes several hard and soft constraints to be satisfied to build a feasible high-quality timetable. It consists of three categories of complexities or difficulties, namely early, test and middle instances. Results showed that the proposed elitist-ant system metaheuristic has obtained competitive timetables for almost all the instances in terms of feasibility and quality. The feasibility is measured by minimizing the violation of hard constraints to zero, while minimizing soft constraints towards zero violations as much as possible. The performance of the elitist-ant system is evaluated by the consumed computational time to produce a timetable, consistency, and robustness. The elitist-ant system showed a robust and consistent performance in producing a diversity of timetables in a reasonable computational time.KeywordsSports timetablingElitist-ant systemInternational timetabling competition 2021Round-robin tournament