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Several real world datasets have been widely introduced to the examination timetabling community with variants of measurement and more practical constraints that represent the real world problems. These datasets were tested on a variety of approaches and a comparison was made for the purpose of scientific research. Table 2.2 shows the list of datasets from universities that were introduced in the literature.

Table 2.2: _{The examination timetabling datasets from different universities}

Pioneer University

Carter et al. (1996) Carleton University, Ottawa; Earl Haig Collegiate Insti- tute, Toronto; Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commercials, Mon- treal; King Fahd University, Dharan; London School of Economics; Ryeson University, Toronto; St. Andrew’s Junior High School, Toronto; Trent University, Peterbor- ough, Ontario; Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto; Faculty of Engineering, University of Toronto; York Mills Collegiate Institute, Toronto

Burke et al. (1996b) University of Nottingham

Erg¨ul (1996) Middle East Technical University Wong et al. (2002) Ecole de Technologie Sup´erieure´ Merlot et al. (2003) University of Melbourne

Kendall and

Mohd Hussin (2005b)

University of Technology MARA ¨

Ozcan and Ersoy (2005) Yeditepe University Kahar and Kendall

(2010)

Universiti Malaysia Pahang

The first problem was introduced by Carter et al. (1996) with thirteen sets of problems from various universities around the world. These benchmark datasets were used widely as test beds in the examination timetabling community, introducing different problem dimensions and characteristics. These datasets are publicly available and can be accessed at ftp://ftp.mie.utoronto.ca/pub/carter/testprob/. A significant contribution by Carter et al. (1996) was the introduction of a penalty cost proximity function to evaluate the quality of examination timetable. The penalty cost was imposed by the number of students distributed across the timetable. A minimum number of time-slots for each benchmark dataset was introduced to this dataset for the purpose of solution

quality assessment. Since there was a problem relating to the circulation of datasets under the same name, Qu et al. (2009b) introduced notations to differentiate various versions of the datasets. In the present thesis, the notation introduced is adapted to specify the datasets and version I is used as a test bed to the proposed approaches. For further details on the datasets and the problem description see Section 2.5.

The University of Nottingham benchmark dataset was first introduced by Burke et al. (1996b), who, in a further study (Burke et al., 1998b) added more constraints that considered consecutive examinations overnight. The original problem involved room requirements and capacities and at the same time took into account the minimisation of students attending two consecutive examinations per day. This dataset can be reached at http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/resources/data.shtml. An earlier study by Burke et al. (1993) had incorporated real world features: eliminating students sitting two consecutive examination periods, minimising disturbance during examination session, assigning the examination to a special room facility and employing variable size of time- slots so that examination length could be reduced.

Erg¨ul (1996) initiated the datasets which involved two real world instances of the exami- nation timetabling problem at the Middle East Technical University. Firstly, there were 682 examinations, while the second instance concerned a larger problem with 1449 ex- aminations and with more constraints. However, some of these constraints were ignored since the implemented system did not take them into account. Study by Wong et al. (2002) introduced the examination timetabling dataset from the ´Ecole de Technologie Sup´erieure for four departments of the engineering school in Montreal. In another study, Kendall and Mohd Hussin (2005b) drew attention to the examination timetabling prob- lem for the Universiti Technology MARA in Malaysia. This dataset is unique since the university has more than one hundred campuses all over the country and an exten- sive timetabling task was involved. An additional constraint posed by the state public holiday was also introduced to the dataset.

Two datasets from the University of Melbourne which related to semesters 1 and 2 for the year 2001 were proposed by Merlot et al. (2003). Two new additional hard constraints were introduced, i.e. the availability of an examination and scheduling large examinations first. The objective was to produce a feasible good quality timetable. The examinations were required to schedule two time-slots per day for five working days and also to fulfill the room capacity requirement for each examination session. The datasets are available at http://www.or.ms.unimelb.edu.au/timetabling.

¨

Ozcan and Ersoy (2005) presented examination timetabling datasets from the Fac- ulty of Engineering and Architecture at Yeditepe University. Two sets of problem instances for two educational years from 2001 until 2003 were used for solving the

timetabling problem, namely, the requirement that students were distributed over the schedule and the room capacity constraint. The objective was to minimise the stu- dents sitting two consecutive exams on the same day. The datasets can be accessed at http://cse.yeditepe.edu.tr/∼eozcan/research/TTML.

The most recent benchmark dataset of educational timetabling, presented by McCol- lum et al. (2008) and McCollum et al. (2010) originates from the Second International Timetabling Competition (ITC2007), which was the continuation of the previous com- petition first introduced in 2002. The aim of the competition was to build a better understanding between researchers and practitioners of real-life problems by allowing new implementation in the problem introduced. The instances of real-life data repre- sented richer problems and several new requirements and limitations that satisfy the real world implementations in examination timetabling. A description of the problem and the results of the competition for each dataset are available in the competition website at http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/ (with the exception of the hidden datasets). This dataset is used to investigate the proposed approaches of the present thesis. Fur- ther discussion on the survey of the implemented approaches and characteristics of the datasets is presented in Sections 2.3 and 2.5.2.

A recent implementation of a real-world dataset was conducted by Kahar and Kendall (2010) at the Universiti Malaysia Pahang. The problem considered two new real-world constraints, i.e. the distance between examination rooms and separating single exami- nation into several rooms. Since the university is still new and there are few large rooms available, examinations are required to be assigned into multiple rooms. The separation of examinations are evaluated based on the distance between rooms.