Academic Timetabling Design Using Hyper-Heuristics

The Educational timetabling problem is a common and hard problem inside every educative institution, this problem tries to coordinate Students, Teachers, Classrooms and Times lots under certain constrains that dependent in many cases the policies of each educational institution. The idea behind hyper-heuristics is to discover some combination of straightforward heuristics to solve a wide range of problems. This paper presents a GA-based method that produces general hyper-heuristics for the educational timetabling design problem using API-Carpio methodology. The GA uses static-length representation; witch involves the complete encoding of a solution algorithm capable to solve schedule design instances, this hyper-heuristic is achieved by learning and testing phases using real instances from Intituto Tecnologico de Leon producing encouraging results for most of the instances. Finally we analyze the quality of our hyper-heuristic in the context of real Academic timetabling process.