Examination timetabling using late acceptance hyper-heuristics

— A hyperheuristic is a high level problem solving methodology that performs a search over the space generated by a set of low level heuristics. One of the hyperheuristic frameworks is based on a single point search containing two main stages: heuristic selection and move acceptance. Most of the existing move acceptance methods compare a new solution, generated after applying a heuristic, against a current solution in order to decide whether to reject it or replace the current one. Late Acceptance Strategy is presented as a promising local search methodology based on a novel move acceptance mechanism. This method performs a comparison between the new candidate solution and a previous solution that is generated L steps earlier. In this study, the performance of a set of hyper-heuristics utilising different heuristic selection methods combined with the Late Acceptance Strategy are investigated over an examination timetabling problem. The results illustrate the potential of this approac...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CEC
• Authors: Ender Özcan, Yuri Bykov, Murat Birben, Edmund K. Burke
• Keywords: Acceptance Methods, Artificial Intelligence, CEC 2009, Heuristic Selection, Late Acceptance Strategy