Harmony Search-based Hyper-heuristic for examination timetabling

In this paper we proposed a Harmony Search-based Hyper-heuristic (HSHH) method for examination timetabling problems. The Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA) is a relatively new metaheuristic algorithm inspired by the musical improvisation process. The Hyper-heuristic is a new trend in optimization that uses a high level heuristic selected from a set of low-level heuristic methods. Examination timetabling is a combinatorial optimization problem which belongs to NP-hard class in almost all of its variations. In HSHH approach, the HSA will operate at a high level of abstraction which intelligently evolves a sequence of improvement low-level heuristics to use for examination timetabling problem. Each low-level heuristics represents a move and swap strategies. We test the proposed method using ITC-2007 benchmark datasets that has 12 de facto datasets of different complexity and size. The proposed method produced competitively comparable results.