University Examination Timetabling Using a Hybrid Black Hole Algorithm

Abstract

University timetabling construction is a complicated task that is encountered by universities in the world. In this study, a hybrid approach has been developed to produce timetable solution for the university examination timetabling problem. Black Hole Algorithm (BHA), a population-based approach that mimics the black hole phenomenon has been introduced in the literature recently and successfully applied in addressing various optimization problems. Although its effectiveness has been proven, there still exists inefficiency regarding the exploitation ability where BHA is poor in fine tuning search region in reaching for good quality of solution. Hence, a hybrid framework for university examination timetabling problem that is based on BHA and Hill Climbing local search is proposed (hybrid BHA). The aim of this hybridization is to improve the exploitation ability of BHA in fine tuning the promising search regions and convergence speed of the search process. A real-world university examination benchmark dataset has been used to evaluate the performance of hybrid BHA. The computational results demonstrate that hybrid BHA capable of generating competitive results and recording best results for three instances, compared to the reference approaches and current best-known recorded in the literature. Other than that, findings from the Friedman tests show that the hybrid BHA ranked second and third in comparison with hybrid and meta-heuristic approaches (total of 27 approaches) reported in the literature, respectively.