Parallel metaheuristic algorithm for exam timetabling

Abstract

Exam timetabling is a computationally intractable problem, which requires heuristic techniques for producing good sub-optimal solutions within reasonable execution time. For large numbers of exams and students, sequential algorithms are likely to be time consuming. The purpose of this work is to present a parallel metaheuristic algorithm for producing good sub-optimal exam timetables in a reasonable time. Empirical results show that our proposed parallel scatter search algorithm yields good speedup. Also, they show that the parallel algorithm improves solution quality in comparison with the sequential algorithm.