scholarly journals Ant Algorithms for the Exam Timetabling Problem

Author(s):  
Michael Eley
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiawei LI ◽  
Tad Gonsalves

This paper presents a Genetic Algorithm approach to solve a specific examination timetabling problem which is common in Japanese Universities. The model is programmed in Excel VBA programming language, which can be run on the Microsoft Office Excel worksheets directly. The model uses direct chromosome representation. To satisfy hard and soft constraints, constraint-based initialization operation, constraint-based crossover operation and penalty points system are implemented. To further improve the result quality of the algorithm, this paper designed an improvement called initial population pre-training. The proposed model was tested by the real data from Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan. The model shows acceptable results, and the comparison of results proves that the initial population pre-training approach can improve the result quality.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2.14) ◽  
pp. 191
Author(s):  
Ahmad Firdaus Khair ◽  
Mokhairi Makhtar ◽  
Munirah Mazlan ◽  
Mohamad Afendee Mohamed ◽  
Mohd Nordin Abdul Rahman

The objective of this paper was to retrieve the overview approaches that have been proposed and classification constraints related to previ-ous papers of timetabling problems. Optimisation and scheduling are essential problems in every type of timetabling that can be considered as a non-deterministic polynomial. The objective of this paper to investigate the course and exam timetabling problem by presented classifi-cation table of set of constraints and describes the most reliable method that has been used to solve university timetabling problem. The re-sult of study concerned the two most successfully method that widely used for optimising course and exam timetable. The contribution of this study also help to provide knowledge and idea for further surveys. 


Author(s):  
Ali Hmer ◽  
Malek Mouhoub

We propose a Multi-Phase Hybrid Metaheuristics approach for solving the Exam Timetabling Problem (ETP). This approach is defined with three phases: pre-processing phase, construction phase and enhancement phase. The pre-processing phase relies on our variable ordering heuristic as well as a form of transitive closure for discovering implicit constraints. The construction phase uses a variant of the Tabu Search with conflicts dictionary. The enhancement phase includes Hill Climbing (HC), Simulated Annealing (SA) and our updated version of the extended “Great Deluge” algorithm. In order to evaluate the performance of the different phases of our proposed approach, we conducted several experiments on instances taken from ITC 2007 benchmarking datasets. The results are very promising and competitive with the well known ETP solvers.


Author(s):  
R. Abounacer ◽  
J. Boukachour ◽  
B. Dkhissi ◽  
A. El Hilali Alaoui

International audience Due to increased student numbers and regulation changes educational institutions that allow for greater flexibility, operations researchers and computer scientists have renewed their interest in developing effective methods to resolve the examination timetabling problem. Thus, in the intervening decades, important progress was made in the examination timetabling problem with appearance of adaptation of meta-heuristics. This paper presents a hybridization of the Ant Colony Algorithm and a Complete Local search with Memory heuristic, in order to maximize as much as possible; the free time between consecutive exams for each student, while respecting the conflict constraints, a student cannot sit more than one exam in the same timeslot. Vue l’augmentation du nombre d’étudiants dans les établissements scolaires et universitaires, le nombre d’examens à passer par chaque étudiant et les réformes pédagogiques actuelles, les planifications classiques des cours et des examens ne sont plus suffisantes, ce qui a amené les chercheurs opérationnels et les informaticiens à chercher des nouvelles méthodes pour résoudre le problème d’emploi du temps des examens. Notre travail consiste à planifier les examens de telle sorte à maximiser le temps de séparation entre deux examens consécutifs pour chaque étudiant et ceci en utilisant l’algorithme de colonies de fourmis hybridé avec une technique de recherche locale.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2.15) ◽  
pp. 132
Author(s):  
Ahmad Firdaus Khair ◽  
Mokhairi Makhtar ◽  
Munirah Mazlan ◽  
Mohamad Afendee Mohamed ◽  
Mohd Nordin Abdul Rahman

At all educational institutions, timetabling is a conventional problem that has always caused numerous difficulties and demands that need to be satisfied. For the examination timetabling problem, those matters can be defined as complexity in scheduling exam events or non-deterministic polynomial hard problems (NP-hard problems). In this study, the latest approach using an ant colony optimisation (ACO) which is the ant system (AS) is presented to find an effective solution for dealing with university exam timetabling problems. This application is believed to be an impressive solution that can be used to eliminate various types of problems for the purpose of optimising the scheduling management system and minimising the number of conflicts. The key of this feature is to simplify and find shorter paths based on index pheromone updating (occurrence matrix). With appropriate algorithm and using efficient techniques, the schedule and assignation allocation can be improved. The approach is applied according to the data set instance that has been gathered. Therefore, performance evaluation and result are used to formulate the proposed approach. This is to determine whether it is reliable and efficient in managing feasible final exam timetables for further use.  


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document