Local Search Techniques for Educational Timetabling Problems

Local Search is an emerging paradigm for combinatorial search, which has been recently shown to be very effective for a large number of combinatorial problems. Educational timetabling problems consist in scheduling a sequence of lectures or examinations between teachers and students in a prefixed period of time (typically a week), satisfying a set of constraints of various types. Problems in this family differ from each other based on the type of events and the kind of institution involved. A number of techniques based on local search have been proposed to address, with success, a variety of timetabling problems. In this paper we present our work on the application of local search techniques to various versions of the educational timetabling problem. We also sketch some of the main results and the specialized software tool employed for the development of the algorithm.