Hyper Heuristic Based on Great Deluge and its Variants for Exam Timetabling Problem

Abstract

Today, University Timetabling problems are occurred annually and they are often hard andtime consuming to solve. This paper describes Hyper Heuristics (HH) method based on Great Deluge(GD) and its variants for solving large, highly constrained timetabling problems from different domains.Generally, in hyper heuristic framework, there are two main stages: heuristic selection and moveacceptance. This paper emphasizes on the latter stage to develop Hyper Heuristic (HH) framework. Themain contribution of this paper is that Great Deluge (GD) and its variants: Flex Deluge(FD), Nonlinear(NLGD), Extended Great Deluge(EGD) are used as move acceptance method in HH by combiningReinforcement learning (RL).These HH methods are tested on exam benchmark timetabling problem andbest results and comparison analysis are reported.