Simulated annealing cooling schedules for the school timetabling problem

This paper describes the use of simulated annealing (SA) for solving the school timetable problem and compares the performance of six different SA cooling schedules: the basic geometric cooling schedule, a scheme which uses two cooling rates, and four schemes which allow reheating as well as cooling. The first two of these reheating schemes are variants of the basic geometric cooling schedule. The third and fourth reheating schemes incorporate a method to compute the temperature that is used as the reheating point. Extensive computational results, which are performed and described, show that the fourth reheating scheme produces consistently better quality solutions in less time than the solutions produced by the other schemes.