Timetabling problems are often hard and timeconsuming to solve. Most of the methods of solving them concern only one problem instance or class. This paper describes a universal method for solving large, highly constrained timetabling problems from different domains. The solution is based on evolutionary algorithm’s framework and operates on two levels – first-level evolutionary algorithm tries ...

This work presents a local search approach to the High School Timetabling Problem. The addressed timetabling model is the one stated in the Third International Timetabling Competition (ITC 2011), which considered many instances from educational institutions around the world and attracted seventeen competitors. Our team, named GOAL (Group of Optimization and Algorithms), developed a solver built...

Automated examination timetabling has been addressed by a wide variety of methodologies and techniques over the last ten years or so. Many of the methods in this broad range of approaches have been evaluated on a collection of benchmark instances provided at the University of Toronto in 1996. Whilst the existence of these datasets has provided an invaluable resource for research into examinatio...

A timetable is a temporal arrangement of a set of meetings such that all given constraints are satis-ed. A timetabling problem can be suitably modelled in terms of a set of constraints. We use constraint logic programming and develop methods, techniques and concepts for a combined interactive and automatic timetabling of university courses and school curricula. An exemplary application of such ...

The study of the relationship and interaction between the work carried out in the academic literature and the requirements of university administrators is essential if ideas generated by research are to benefit every day users. Conversely, it is crucial the needs of the timetabling community influence the direction taken by research if high quality practical solutions are to be produced. A main...

This paper considers a solution to the school timetabling problem. The timetabling problem involves scheduling a number of tuples, each consisting of class of students, a teacher, a subject and a room, to a fixed number of time slots. A Monte Carlo scheme called simulated annealing is used as an optimisation technique. The paper introduces the timetabling problem, and then describes the simulat...

Examination timetabling is a type of educational timetabling which is a highly challenging field for the researchers and practitioners. Examination timetabling problems require a search for the best assignment of examinations into a fixed number of time-slots possibly along with other resources, such as, a set of rooms with certain capacities, subject to a set of constraints. There are two comm...

Course timetabling problems are real world constraint optimization problems that are often coped with in educational institutions, such as universities or high schools. In this paper, we present a variety of new operators that can be also applied in evolutionary algorithms for other timetabling problems, such as, exam timetabling. Operators include violation directed mutations, crossovers, and ...

There is a variety of approaches developed by researchers to solve different instances of timetabling problems. During these studies different data formats are used to represent a timetabling problem instance and its solution, causing difficulties in the evaluation and comparison of approaches and sharing data. In this paper, a model for timetabling problems and a new data format for them based...