A comparison of the performance of different metaheuristics on the timetabling problem

Olivia Rossi-Doria, Michael Sampels, Mauro Birattari, Marco Chiarandini, Marco Dorigo, Luca M. Gambardella, Joshua Knowles, Max Manfrin, Monaldo Mastrolilli, Ben Paechter, Luis Paquete, Thomas Stützle

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    Abstract

    The main goal of this paper is to attempt an unbiased comparison of the performance of straightforward implementations of five different metaheuristics on a university course timetabling problem. In particular, the metaheuristics under consideration are Evolutionary Algorithms, Ant Colony Optimization, Iterated Local Search, Simulated Annealing, and Tabu Search. To attempt fairness, the implementations of all the algorithms use a common solution representation, and a common neighbourhood structure or local search. The results show that no metaheuristic is best on all the timetabling instances considered. Moreover, even when instances are very similar, from the point of view of the instance generator, it is not possible to predict the best metaheuristic, even if some trends appear when focusing on particular instance classes. These results underline the difficulty of finding the best metaheuristics even for very restricted classes of timetabling problem. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)|Lect. Notes Comput. Sci.
    PublisherSpringer Nature
    Pages329-351
    Number of pages22
    Volume2740
    Publication statusPublished - 2003

    Publication series

    NameLNCS

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