Success of an ASAP team at the Third International Timetabling Competition (ITC2011)

The results of the Third International Timetabling Competition were presented at the 9th International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling conference. The HySST (Hyper-heuristic Search Strategies and Timetabling) team consisting of Ahmed Kheiri, Ender Özcan and Andrew Parkes from the School, ASAP and the LANCS initiative (S&I Award) joined the three rounds of the competition. Despite this being their first attempt in high school timetabling, HySST generated the best new solutions for three given instances in Round 1 and gained the second place in Rounds 2 and 3 with a fairly standard stochastic search method but significantly enhanced by an easy-to-implement hyper-heuristic.