A review of hyper-heuristics for educational timetabling

Educational timetabling problems, namely, university examination timetabling, university course timetabling and school timetabling, are combinatorial optimization problems requiring the allocation of resources so as to satisfy a specified set of constraints. Hyper-heuristics have been successfully applied to a variety of combinatorial optimization problems. This is a rapidly growing field which aims at providing generalized solutions to combinatorial optimization problems by exploring a heuristic space instead of a solution space. From the research conducted thus far it is evident that hyper-heuristics are effective at solving educational timetabling problems and have the potential of advancing this field by providing a generalized solution to educational timetabling as a whole. Given this, the paper provides an overview and critical analysis of hyper-heuristics for educational timetabling and proposes future research directions, focusing on using hyper-heuristics to provide a generalized solution to educational timetabling.