The construction of an exam timetable is a common problem for all universities and institutions of higher education. Quite often it is done by hand or with the limited help of a simple administration system and usually involves taking the previous year’s timetable and modifying it so it will work for the new year. But increasing the number of students, changing the courses that are offered and student’s freedom in selecting them, needs a great correction on the past year’s timetable and also so much time. Therefore it is no longer good enough to use the previous year’s timetable. In this approach we modify Scatter Search method and solve the Examination Timetabling Problem (ETP) with a first solution procedure that is based on scatter search. Also we solve this problem with existing methods such as Simulated Annealing and Tabu search and compare results of them with each other. Finally we apply new Scatter Search algorithm on Carter’s datasets and conclude that our algorithm works better than other published results.

Keywords