The scheduling of examinations in universities or institutions is known to be a highly constrained combinatorial optimization problem. Generally it is done manually or with the limited help of a simple administration system and it usually involves, taking the previous year's timetable and modifying that so it will work for the next year. But now a days most of good universities provide much gre...

We propose a Simulated Annealing approach for the Examination Timetabling problem, as formulated in the 2nd International Timetabling Competition. We apply a single-stage procedure in which infeasible solutions are included in the search space and dealt with using suitable penalties. Upon our approach, we perform a statistically-principled experimental analysis, in order to understand the effec...

This paper describes how the university timetabling problem is addressed in the Laurea course Ingegneria dell’Informazione (Information Engineering) for the University of Ferrara, Italy. The university timetabling problem is modelled as a Constraint Optimisation Problem and addressed with ECLPS, one of the leading Constraint Logic Programming languages.

This paper presents a real-world, capacitated examination timetabling problem from Universiti Malaysia Pahang (UMP), Malaysia. The problem has constraints which have not been modelled before, these being the distance between examination rooms and splitting exams across several rooms. These constraints provide additional challenges in defining a suitable model and in developing a constructive he...

In this paper, we study the multi-machine scheduling problem with earliness and tardiness penalties and sequence dependent setup times. This problem can be decomposedinto two subproblems sequencing and timetabling. Sequencing focuses on assigning each job to a fixed machine and determine the job sequence on each machine. We call such assignment a semi-schedule. Timetabling focuses on finding an...

Timetabling tasks form a widely studied type of resource scheduling problem, with important real-world applications in schools, universities and other educational settings. In this work, we focus on postenrollment course timetabling, the problem that was covered by Track 2 of the recent 2nd International Timetabling Competition (ITC2007). Following an approach that makes strong use of automated...

Examination timetabling is one of the most important administrative activities that takes place in all academic institutions. In this paper we present a critical discussion of the research on exam timetabling in the last decade or so. This last ten years has seen a significantly increased level of research attention for this important area. There has been a range of insightful contributions to ...

In this paper we describe a successful case-study where a Branch-and-Cut algorithm yields the “optimal” solution of a real-world timetabling problem for university courses (University Course Timetabling problem). The polyhedral structure of the problem is studied in conection with a polytope of the Set Packing problem. Several families of cutting planes are introduced, these being crutial to fi...

Selection hyper-heuristics are high level search methodologies which control a set of low level heuristics while solving a given problem. Move acceptance is a crucial component of selection hyper-heuristics, deciding whether to accept or reject a new solution at each step during the search process. This study investigates group decision making strategies as ensemble methods exploiting the stren...

Many techniques for solving the Examination Timetabling Problem have been studied over the years. One such successful method is Heuristic Ordering. Examinations are assigned sequentially to the timetable in a predefined order established on the basis of some characteristic of the individual events. Typically events are scheduled by decreasing order of difficulty. This construction heuristic may...