Examination timetabling using a hill climbing with combined neighbourhood structure

Abstract

This paper proposes a hill climbing local search method with combined neighbourhood structure, for solving examination timetabling problem. In this proposed hill climbing local search method, instead of considering only one neighbourhood structure, several different neighbourhood structures are employed. In this method, if the best found solution is not improved for a predefined maximum iteration number, the current neighbourhood structure will be changed. The proposed local search method is tested on some Carter benchmark problems. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed hill climbing outperforms those of hill climbing methods with single neighbourhood structure. Also a comparison of the proposed method with some other methods reported in the literature confirms a comparable performance of our proposed hill climbing. © 2011 IEEE.