Grammar-based genetic programming for timetabling

Abstract

We present a grammar-based genetic programming framework for the solving the timetabling problem via the evolution of constructive heuristics. The grammar used for producing new generations is based on graph colouring heuristics that have previously proved to be effective in constructing timetables as well as different slot allocation heuristics. The framework is tested on a widely used benchmarks in the field of exam time-tabling and compared with highly-tuned state-of-the-art approaches. Results shows that the framework is very competitive with other constructive techniques.