A Multi-start Very Large Neighbourhood Search Approach with Local Search Methods for Examination Timetabling

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This paper investigates a hybridisation of the very large neighbourhood search approach with local search methods to address examination timetabling problems. In this paper, we describe a 2 phase approach. The first phase employs �multi start� to carry out search upon a very large neighbourhood of solutions using graph theoretical algorithms implemented on an improvement graph. The second phase makes further improvements by utilising a local search method. We present experimental results which show that this combined approach compares favourably with other algorithms on the standard benchmark problems.