Grasp and Guided Local Search for the examination timetabling problem

Abstract

Examination timetabling is an optimisation problem, which regards the scheduling of a set of exams to a set of contiguous time slots, satisfying a set of constraints. The problem belongs to the class of NP-Complete problems and is usually tackled using heuristic methods. In this paper, we describe a solution algorithm and its implementation which makes use of the good features of a Greedy Randomised Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) and the Guided Local Search (GLS) meta-heuristic. The implementation of the algorithm has been experimented on the popular Carter's benchmarks and compared with the best recent results.