A honey-bee mating optimization algorithm for educational timetabling problems

In this work, we propose a variant of the honey-bee mating optimization algorithm for solving educational timetabling problems. The honey-bee algorithm is a nature inspired algorithm which simulates the process of real honey-bees mating. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested over two benchmark problems; exam (Carter’s un-capacitated datasets) and course (Socha datasets) timetabling problems. We chose these two datasets as they have been widely studied in the literature and we would also like to evaluate our algorithm across two different, yet related, domains. Results demonstrate that the performance of the honey-bee mating optimization algorithm is comparable with the results of other approaches in the scientific literature. Indeed, the proposed approach obtains best results compared with other approaches on some instances, indicating that the honey-bee mating optimization algorithm is a promising approach in solving educational timetabling problems.

► We propose a variant of honey bee mating algorithm for timetabling problems. ► The performance of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated across two domains, namely, exam and course timetabling problems. ► Results obtained on two variants of timetabling problems are competitive if not better for some instances.