Constraint propagation + Ant Colony Optimization for automated school timetabling

Abstract

This paper shows a hybrid ant algorithm for automated school timetabling, Really Full Look-ahead + Ant Colony Optimization (RFL+ACO). Previously, a constraint propagation based timetabling algorithm, Really Full Look-ahead Greedy (RFLG), has been proposed and has shown good results for some real timetabling problems. We adopt Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) to this algorithm in order to iteratively learn a selection order of variables to be instantiated and a selection policy of values to be assigned. A performance evaluation experiment using a real timetable data of unified lower and upper secondary school has been conducted, and results show that the proposed algorithm can construct good timetables.