Decomposition and Parallelization of Multi-resource Timetabling Problems

The timetabling problem consists in fixing a sequence of meetings between teachers and students in a prefixed period of time (typically a week), satisfying a set of constraints of various types. [1] Course timetabling is a multidimensional NP-Complete problem. [2] In this paper we present MultiResource Timetabling Problem (MRTP), which is our model for generalized high-school timetabling problem. The MRTP is a search problem – we try to find a feasible solution. Backtracking search was selected for solving MRTP. The main contribution of this paper is the Decomposition Algorithm for MRTP to parallelize the search, so the whole MRTP can be easily distributed and parallelized. Our approach was applied to a real life instances of high-school timetabling problems. Results are discussed at the end of this paper and parallelized search is compared with the centralized one.