Late acceptance hill-climbing for high school timetabling

• Published in: Journal of scheduling Vol. 19; no. 4; pp. 453 - 465
• Main Authors: Fonseca, George H. G., Santos, Haroldo G., Carrano, Eduardo G.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01-08-2016; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Acceptance; Algorithms; Artificial Intelligence; Business and Management; Calculus of Variations and Optimal Control; Optimization; Climbing; Competition; Integer programming; Mathematical problems; Mathematical programming; Operations Research/Decision Theory; Optimization; Scheduling; Search algorithms; Secondary schools; Studies; Supply Chain Management; Workloads; Late Acceptance Hill-Climbing; Local search; Third International Timetabling Competition; High School Timetabling
• ISSN: 1094-6136; 1099-1425
• DOI: 10.1007/s10951-015-0458-5

The application of the Late Acceptance Hill-Climbing (LAHC) to solve the High School Timetabling Problem is the subject of this manuscript. The original algorithm and two variants proposed here are tested jointly with other state-of-art methods to solve the instances proposed in the Third International Timetabling Competition. Following the same rules of the competition, the LAHC-based algorithms noticeably outperformed the winning methods. These results, and reports from the literature, suggest that the LAHC is a reliable method that can compete with the most employed local search algorithms.