Investigating Ahuja–Orlin’s large neighbourhood search approach for examination timetabling

Springer Science and Business Media LLC - Tập 29 - Trang 351-372 - 2006
Salwani Abdullah1, Samad Ahmadi2, Edmund K. Burke1, Moshe Dror3
1Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning Research Group, School of Computer Science & Information Technology, University of Nottingham, Jubilee Campus, Nottingham, UK
2School of Computing, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
3MIS Department, Eller College of Management, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA

Tóm tắt

Since the 1960s, automated approaches to examination timetabling have been explored and a wide variety of approaches have been investigated and developed. In this paper we build upon a recently presented, sequential solution improvement technique which searches efficiently over a very large set of “adjacent” (neighbourhood) solutions. This solution search methodology, originally developed by Ahuja and Orlin, has been applied successfully in the past to a number of difficult combinatorial optimisation problems. It is based on an improvement graph representation of solution adjacency and identifies improvement moves by finding cycle exchange operations using a modified shortest path label-correcting algorithm. We have drawn upon Ahuja–Orlin’s basic methodology to develop an effective automated exam timetabling technique. We have evaluated our approach against the latest methodologies in the literature on standard benchmark problems. We demonstrate that our approach produces some of the best known results on these problems.

Tài liệu tham khảo

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