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A \(\beta \)-hill climbing optimizer for examination timetabling problem

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Abstract

Examination timetable is a non-trivial task for administrators of the academic institutions repeated every semester. In terms of optimization, examination timetabling is a combinatorial optimization problem concerned with assigning a set of exams to a predefined number of timeslots and rooms with accordance to a given constraints. In this paper, the extended version of hill climbing algorithm called \(\beta \)-hill climbing is utilized to tackle the examination timetabling problem. \(\beta \)-hill climbing is a new local search-based method that has two operators (\(\beta \)-operator and \({\mathcal {N}}\)-operator) to iterate towards the optimal solution. The saturation degree heuristic method is utilized in the improvement loop of \(\beta \)-hill climbing to ensure the solution feasibility. For experimental evaluation, Carter dataset is used comprising 12 instances selected from several real-world universities. Eight convergence scenarios are designed to sensitively analyze the behavior of the proposed algorithm. For comparative evaluations, the results produced by \(\beta \)-hill climbing are comparatively comparable with previous methods that utilized the same Carter instances.

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  1. Department of Information Technology,Al-Huson University College, Al-Balqa Applied University, P.O. Box 50, Al-Huson, Irbid, Jordan

    Mohammed Azmi Al-Betar

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  1. Mohammed Azmi Al-Betar
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Correspondence to Mohammed Azmi Al-Betar.

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Al-Betar, M.A. A \(\beta \)-hill climbing optimizer for examination timetabling problem. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 12, 653–666 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-020-02047-2

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