A survey of practical applications of examination timetabling algorithms
Operations Research
Journal of Computational Physics
A Survey of Automated Timetabling
Artificial Intelligence Review
An Electromagnetism-like Mechanism for Global Optimization
Journal of Global Optimization
Computer-Aided School and University Timetabling: The New Wave
Selected papers from the First International Conference on Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling
Recent Developments in Practical Examination Timetabling
Selected papers from the First International Conference on Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling
Examination Timetabling in British Universities: A Survey
Selected papers from the First International Conference on Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling
A MAX-MIN Ant System for the University Course Timetabling Problem
ANTS '02 Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Ant Algorithms
A Tabu-Search Hyperheuristic for Timetabling and Rostering
Journal of Heuristics
An effective hybrid algorithm for university course timetabling
Journal of Scheduling
Case-based selection of initialisation heuristics for metaheuristic examination timetabling
Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
An electromagnetic meta-heuristic for the nurse scheduling problem
Journal of Heuristics
An Extended Implementation of the Great Deluge Algorithm for Course Timetabling
ICCS '07 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Computational Science, Part I: ICCS 2007
Generating University Course Timetable Using Genetic Algorithms and Local Search
ICCIT '08 Proceedings of the 2008 Third International Conference on Convergence and Hybrid Information Technology - Volume 01
RSKT '09 Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Rough Sets and Knowledge Technology
Decomposition, reformulation, and diving in university course timetabling
Computers and Operations Research
INFORMS Journal on Computing
A perspective on bridging the gap between theory and practice in university timetabling
PATAT'06 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Practice and theory of automated timetabling VI
The electromagnetism meta-heuristic applied to the resource-constrained project scheduling problem
EA'05 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Artificial Evolution
Dynamic job scheduling on the grid environment using the great deluge algorithm
PaCT'07 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Parallel Computing Technologies
Information Sciences: an International Journal
Computers and Industrial Engineering
On the performance of Scatter Search for post-enrolment course timetabling problems
Journal of Combinatorial Optimization
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This paper describes the development of a novel metaheuristic that combines an electromagnetic-like mechanism (EM) and the great deluge algorithm (GD) for the University course timetabling problem. This well-known timetabling problem assigns lectures to specific numbers of timeslots and rooms maximizing the overall quality of the timetable while taking various constraints into account. EM is a population-based stochastic global optimization algorithm that is based on the theory of physics, simulating attraction and repulsion of sample points in moving toward optimality. GD is a local search procedure that allows worse solutions to be accepted based on some given upper boundary or `level'. In this paper, the dynamic force calculated from the attraction-repulsion mechanism is used as a decreasing rate to update the `level' within the search process. The proposed method has been applied to a range of benchmark university course timetabling test problems from the literature. Moreover, the viability of the method has been tested by comparing its results with other reported results from the literature, demonstrating that the method is able to produce improved solutions to those currently published. We believe this is due to the combination of both approaches and the ability of the resultant algorithm to converge all solutions at every search process.