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...

In constraint programming [JM94, Wal96, FA97, MS98], combinatorial problems are specified declaratively in terms of constraints. Constraints are relations over problem variables that define the space of solutions by specifying restrictions on the values that the variables may take simultaneously. To solve problems stated in terms of constraints, the constraint programmer typically combines chro...

The examination timetabling problem has been studied in many different forms and using a variety of techniques over the years [1], [3], [4], [6]. In its simplest form, it is required that a set of exams are scheduled into a set of time periods in such a way that no two exams with students in common are scheduled at the same time. In practice there are a wide range of other constraints which mus...

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...

A very important factor for the success of a local search is the neighborhood employed during the search. Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) algorithms [5] employ more than one neighborhood and change the employment of these neighborhoods during the search. It provides a very effective way of escaping from local optima and is both versatile and successful compared to other local search techniqu...

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...

Examination timetabling is a well-studied combinatorial optimization problem. We present a new hybrid algorithm for examination timetabling, consisting of three phases: a constraint programming phase to develop an initial solution, a simulated annealing phase to improve the quality of solution, and a hill climbing phase for further improvement. The examination timetabling problem at the Univers...

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...