In this paper we propose a variable neighbourhood search (VNS) meta-heuristic [25] for the university examination timetabling problem. In addition to a basic VNS method, we introduce a variety of variants which further improve the quality of the results produced by the technique. We also aim to demonstrate that the proposed technique is capable of producing high quality solutions across a wide ...

We consider an academic timetabling and rostering problem involving periodic retraining of large numbers of employees at an Australian electricity distributor. This problem is different from traditional high-school and university timetabling problems studied in the literature in several aspects. We propose a three-stage heuristic consisting of timetable generation, timetable improvement, and tr...

We present a general heuristic technique that solves a timetabling problem, such as school timetabling. It is based on a Hopfield-type neural network, whose complexity was significantly reduced by incorporating a genetic algorithm into a very first stage of the timetabling process. The goal of the GA was to initialize the network so that the number of neurons and their connections decreased, an...

This work presents the application of Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) based algorithms to the High School Timetabling Problem. The addressed model of the problem was proposed by the Third International Timetabling Competition (ITC 2011), which released many instances from educational institutions around the world and attracted seventeen competitors. Some of the VNS algorithm variants were ab...

This technical report focuses on a concrete instance of the real-life employee timetabling problem presented in the paper “Applying CP(FD), CLP(FD) and CFLP(FD) to a Real-Life Employee Timetabling Problem”. It provides additional material that would help the reader of the paper in both understanding the algorithm proposed as well as the code of the models provided online.

The ant colony optimisation metaheuristic has shown promise on simplified artificial instances of university course timetabling problems. However, limited work has been done applying it to practical timetabling problems. In this paper, we describe the application of the ant colony optimisation to a highly constrained real–world instance of the university course timetabling problem. We present t...

This paper is the organizers’ report on the Third International Timetabling Competition (ITC2011), run during the first half of 2012. Its participants tackled 35 instances of the high school timetabling problem, taken from schools in 10 countries.