Multi-neighbourhood simulated annealing for the ITC-2007 capacitated examination timetabling problem

We propose a multi-neighbourhood simulated annealing algorithm for the ITC-2007 version of the capacitated examination timetabling problem. The proposed solver is based on a combination of existing as well as newly proposed neighbourhoods that better exploit the disconnected structure of the underlying conflict graph and that explicitly deal with the assignment of exams to rooms. We use a principled tuning procedure to determine the parameters of the algorithm and assess the contribution of the various neighbourhoods by means of an ablation analysis. The resulting algorithm is able to compete with existing state-of-the-art solvers and finds several new best solutions for a variety of well-known problem instances.