Systematic Literature Review of Metaheuristic Methodologies for High School Timetabling Problem

The purpose of this study is to review metaheuristic methods and provide fair comparisons of different metaheuristic methodologies in High School Timetabling Problem (HSTP) as many previous comparative studies that were performed are based on different structure and classification. This study is conducted to provide answer on what metaheuristic algorithm were applied in HSTP, types of datasets most used by metaheuristic algorithm, and metaheuristic algorithms that have yet to be explored. This study starts by forming research questions and performing search process using search terms on identified resources. The selected resources were further scrutinized and went through quality assessment before data synthesis. The most used metaheuristic methods are found to be from type of non-population based and in hybrid approaches. The most used HSTP data set by researchers is the XSHTT data set. Population based and nature inspired metaheuristic methodologies were explored further as many methods of these type have not been applied in HSTP. This study provides opportunities for further studies particularly in metaheuristic algorithm regarding HSTP.