Authors : F. Djannaty and A.R. Mirzaei
Abstract: Examination Timetabling Problem (ETP) is a real life problem encountered in many academic institutions and has attracted the attention of the Operational Research and Artificial Intelligence research communities since the 1960s. In this study, a variant of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), the Max-Min Ant System (MMAS) is used to solve the Examination timetabling problem. The key feature of our approach is the combination of a simple local search and MMAS. A preprocessing heuristic is utilized to initially sort the exams. Great Deluge algorithm is used as a local search to improve the constructed solutions by MMAS. We applied our algorithm to a number of test problem data sets. The numerical results obtained from our method shows that the quality of the solutions are better than some or tie the best-published results from the literature, especially on capacitated examination timetabling problem.
F. Djannaty and A.R. Mirzaei , 2008. Enhancing Max-Min Ant System for Examination Timetabling Problem. International Journal of Soft Computing, 3: 230-238.