2003 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Enhancing Timetable Solutions with Local Search Methods
Authors : E. K. Burke, J. P. Newall
Published in: Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling IV
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Included in: Professional Book Archive
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It is well known that domain-specific heuristics can produce good-quality solutions for timetabling problems in a short amount of time. However, they often lack the ability to do any thorough optimisation. In this paper we will study the effects of applying local search techniques to improve good-quality initial solutions generated using a heuristic construction method. While the same rules should apply to any heuristic construction, we use here an adaptive approach to timetabling problems. The focus of the experiments is how parameters to the local search methods affect quality when started on already good solutions. We present experimental results which show that this combined approach produces the best published results on several benchmark problems and we briefly discuss the implications for future work in the area.