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.

Scheduling is one the problems on which so many researches have been done over years and university course timetabling problem which is a NP-hard problem is a type of scheduling problem. On the other hand, timetabling process must be done for each semester frequently which is an exhausting and time consuming task. University course timetabling problem performs the allocation of whole events to ...

This paper presents an innovative approach to curriculum-based timetabling. Curricula are defined by a rich model that includes optional courses and course groups among which students are expected to take a subset of courses. Transformation of the curriculum model into the enrollment model is proposed and a local search algorithm generating corresponding enrollments is introduced. This enables ...

This paper presents a case-based heuristic selection approach for automated university course and exam timetabling. The method described in this paper is motivated by the goal of developing timetabling systems that are fundamentally more general than the current state of the art. Heuristics that worked well in previous similar situations are memorized in a case base and are retrieved for solvin...

Although timetabling has long been studied through constraint satisfaction based techniques, along with many alternatives, only recently work has been reported where distributed timetabling problems (DisTTPs) was studied as distributed constraint satisfaction problems (DisCSPs). We present an alternative method for solving DisTTPs based on multiply sectioned constraint networks (MSCNs). The pro...

The examination timetabling problem has been extensively studied since Carter produced a collection of real instances [1] (for a recent survey see [2]). This year, a significant extension to the set of realistic instances has been provided by the examination timetabling track [3] of the 2007 International Timetabling Competition2. The exam track instances are much more realistic than the Carter...

An earlier Case-based Reasoning (CBR) approach developed by the authors for educational course timetabling problems employed structured cases to represent the complex relationships between courses. The retrieval searches for structurally similar cases in the case base. In this paper, the approach is further developed to solve a wider range of problems. We also attempt to retrieve those cases th...

The process of gathering enough experimental statistical data over a set of instances of the Course timetabling problem (CTTP) could take a lot of time to an interested researcher. There exist several parallel computing models capable to accelerating the execution process of metaheuristic algorithms. This paper explores the idea to use a parallel model in a metaheuristic algorithm over the Cour...

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...

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 employs tabu search to speed up the solution finding...