IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/tjorxx/v70y2019i6p873-888.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Simulated annealing with improved reheating and learning for the post enrolment course timetabling problem

Author

Listed:
  • Say Leng Goh
  • Graham Kendall
  • Nasser R. Sabar

Abstract

In this paper, we utilise a two-stage approach for addressing the post enrolment course timetabling (PE-CTT) problem. We attempt to find a feasible solution in the first stage. The solution is further improved in terms of soft constraint violations in the second stage. We present an enhanced variant of the Simulated Annealing with Reheating (SAR) algorithm, which we term Simulated Annealing with Improved Reheating and Learning (SAIRL). We propose a reinforcement learning-based methodology to obtain a suitable neighbourhood structure for the search to operate effectively. We incorporate the average cost changes into the reheating temperature function. The proposed enhancements are tested on three widely studied benchmark data-sets. Our algorithm eliminates the need for tuning parameters in conventional SA as well as neighbourhood structure composition in SAR. The results are highly competitive with SAR and other state of the art methods. In addition, SAIRL is scalable when the runtime is extended. The algorithm achieves new best results for 6 instances and new mean results for 14 instances.

Suggested Citation

  • Say Leng Goh & Graham Kendall & Nasser R. Sabar, 2019. "Simulated annealing with improved reheating and learning for the post enrolment course timetabling problem," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 70(6), pages 873-888, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:tjorxx:v:70:y:2019:i:6:p:873-888
    DOI: 10.1080/01605682.2018.1468862
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01605682.2018.1468862
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/01605682.2018.1468862?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kadri Sylejmani & Edon Gashi & Adrian Ymeri, 2023. "Simulated annealing with penalization for university course timetabling," Journal of Scheduling, Springer, vol. 26(5), pages 497-517, October.
    2. Ceschia, Sara & Di Gaspero, Luca & Schaerf, Andrea, 2023. "Educational timetabling: Problems, benchmarks, and state-of-the-art results," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 308(1), pages 1-18.
    3. Fabian Dunke & Stefan Nickel, 2023. "A matheuristic for customized multi-level multi-criteria university timetabling," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 328(2), pages 1313-1348, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:tjorxx:v:70:y:2019:i:6:p:873-888. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/tjor .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.