| Biography | |
|---|---|
 Dr. Syariza Abdul Rahman Northern Malaysia University, Malaysia |
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| Title: Modified Harmony Search Algorithm for the High School Timetabling Problem | |
| Abstract: In recent years, the optimization of the high school timetabling problem (HSTP) has received a lot of attention due to the complexity of the problem. Harmony search algorithm (HSA) is one of metaheuristic technique which is considered as a promising approach in solving HSTP. Several enhancements to HSA have been made to better balance the exploration and exploitation of the search space for obtaining good solutions. However, some modifications to HSA is required for further improvement especially on its parameter tuning. Thus, a modified HSA with dynamic parameters is proposed for solving the HSTP. The proposed method is applied to XHSTT2014 benchmark datasets and significantly enhances the performance on most of the datasets compared to the existing best-known results. The modified HSA with dynamic parameters is a very useful approach for solving HSTP. Keywords: High School Timetabling, XHSTT, KHE, Harmony Search Algorithm, Dynamic Parameters | |
| Biography: Syariza Abdul-Rahman is an associate professor of Decision Science in the School of Quantitative Sciences at the Universiti Utara Malaysia. She is also working as an assistance research fellow under the Institute of Strategic Industrial Decision Modeling (ISIDM). Her interest includes operational research, computational optimization, scheduling, timetabling and heuristics and metaheuristics. She received her Bachelor degree in Statistics-Information Technology in 2001 at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and her Master degree in Decision Science in 2004 at the Universiti Utara Malaysia. Her PhD is in Computer Science was obtained at the University of Nottingham in 2012. Her PhD thesis is on Search Methodologies for Examination Timetabling by using heuristic and metaheuristics approaches. She has published her works in European Journal of Operational Research, Annals of Operations Research, Journal of Information and Communication Technology, Advances in Operations Research and many more. | |
