The examination timetabling problem represents a major administrative activity for academic institutions. An increasing number of student enrolments, a wider variety of courses and increasing number of combined degree courses contribute to the growing challenge of developing examination timetabling software to cater for the broad spectrum of constraints required by educational institutions. In ...

Vertex colouring is a well-known problem in combinatorial optimisation, whose alternative integer programming formulations have recently attracted considerable attention. This paper briefly surveys seven known formulations of vertex colouring and introduces a new formulation of vertex colouring using a suitable clique partition of the graph. This formulation is applicable in timetabling applica...

Timetabling problems are well known NP-hard constraint satisfaction, and real-world cases often have complicated and challenging structures. For such problems, we present a new hybrid method, “Interleaved Constructive Memetic Algorithm” (ICMA) that interleaves memetic algorithms with constructive methods. ICMA works using an active subset of all the events. Starting with a few events, in multip...

Educational timetabling problem is a challenging real world problem which has been of interest to many researchers and practitioners. There are many variants of this problem which mainly require scheduling of events and resources under various constraints. In this study, a curriculum based course timetabling problem at Yeditepe University is described and an iterative selection hyper-heuristic ...

Railway timetabling is an important process in train service provision as it matches the transportation demand with the infrastructure capacity while customer satisfaction is also considered. It is a multi-objective optimisation problem, in which a feasible solution, rather than the optimal one, is usually taken in practice because of the time constraint. The quality of services may suffer as a...

The course timetabling problem is one of the most difficult combinatorial problems, it requires the assignment of a fixed number of subjects into a number of time slots minimizing the number of student conflicts. This article presents a comparison between state-of-the-art hyper-heuristics and a newly proposed iterated variable neighborhood descent algorithm when solving the course timetabling p...

the aim of this study was to compare three approaches of medical parasitological course. this cross sectional study carried out in 94 medical and pharmacy students. lecturer based learning, problem based learning, and combined approaches were used for teaching the parasitological course. kappa and spss16 were used to analysis. 82.9% of students were interested in lecturer based learning, 64.9% ...

Timetabling the courses offered at the Computer Science Department of the University of Munich requires the processing of hard and soft constraints. Hard constraints are conditions that must be satisfied, soft constraints however may be violated, but should be satisfied as much as possible. This paper shows how to model our timetabling problem as a partial constraint satisfaction problem and gi...

Many complex timetabling problems have an underpinning bounded graph colouring component, a pattern penalisation component and a number of side constraints. The bounded graph colouring component corresponds to hard constraints such as “students are in at most one place at one time” and “there is a limited number of rooms” [1]. Despite the hardness of graph colouring, it is often easy to generat...