| Electromagnetism (EM) has been recently introduced as a strong method for the optimization of unconstrained continuous functions based on an analogy with electromagnetism theory. Also Simulated Annealing (SA), Tabu Search (TS), Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Ant Colony System (ACS) are five of the main algorithms for solving challenging problems of optimization and intelligent systems. In this paper, we represent a new heuristic method based on EM and apply these four techniques to a classical Examination Timetabling Problem (ETP), an NP complete problem. The EM method is applied on this problem for the first time in literature; and all of these methods are tested on ten different scenarios of the classical ETP. Statistical comparative analyses conclude that EM technique is significantly better than each metaheuristic, and furthermore provides the superior solution of all. Finally, we effort to obtain some improvements of EM via changing some parts of it. |
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