A SA-VNS approach for the High School Timetabling Problem

The High School Timetabling Problem consists in assigning timeslots and resources to events, satisfying constraints which heavily depend on the specific institution. This work deals with the problem of the ongoing III International Timetabling Competition (ITC), which includes a diverse set of instances from many educational institutions around the world. We proposed an approach based on Simulated Annealing and Variable Neighborhood Search metaheuristics. One important structural feature of our approach is the use of the Kingstonʹs High School Timetabling Engine (KHE) to generate initial solutions combined with the multi-neighborhood search. Such approach led us to the finals of the ongoing competition.