Parallel local search algorithms for high school timetabling problems

High school timetabling consists in assigning meetings between classes and teachers, with the goal of minimizing the violation of specific soft requirements. This family of problems has been frequently considered in the literature, but few strategies employing parallelism have been proposed. In this exploratory study, we consider two different parallel frameworks and present a thorough computational study in order to understand algorithmic decisions that are closely related to performance. Our best algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for variants of the problem considered, indicating both the efficiency and the flexibility of the method.