The aim of this paper is to give a brief introduction to some recent approaches to timetabling problems that have been developed or are under development in the Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning Research Group (ASAP) at the University of Nottingham. We have concentrated upon university timetabling but we believe that some of the methodologies that are described can be used for dif...

The present article focuses on the efficient deployment of dual locomotives in regional rail freight transport considering quantification traction energy and savings. In first part article, a categorization locomotives, according to their power output electric alternative (and ratio both outputs) is proposed. potential chosen Central European conditions (a sub-network Czech railway network arou...

Timetabling is a difficult (NP-complete) problem and belongs to a general class of problems known as scheduling. Due to a variety of constraints typical in different timetabling environments, it has been difficult to develop a generic solution for timetabling. This paper is an attempt to define a generic computational model for examination timetabling for predefined constraints found in the pro...

QuikFix is a software program for solving timetabling problems. The software adapts repair-based heuristic search known in SAT solving to the timetabling domain. A high-level timetabling-specific model enforces structural constraints and allows for meaningful moves in the search space, such as swaps of the time slots or venues of events. QuikFix uses known techniques to improve the search perfo...

Following the success of the First International Timetabling Competition in 2002, the timetabling research community is organising a new competition on this problem (opening August 1st). This new competition will be on three different timetabling problems, and one of the tracks concerns the course timetabling formulation that applies to Italian universities (called Curriculum-based Course Timet...

In this paper, we first illustrate the state-of-the-art in timetabling research w.r.t. two important research qualities, namely measurability and reproducibility, analyzing what we believe are the most important contributions in the literature. Secondly, we discuss some practices that, in our opinion, could contribute to the improvement on the two aforementioned qualities for future papers in t...

This paper examines the use of genetic algorithms (GAs) to solve the school timetabling problem. The school timetabling problem falls into the category of NP-hard problems. Instances of this problem vary drastically from school to school and country to country. Previous work in this area has used genetic algorithms to solve a particular school timetabling problem and has not evaluated the perfo...

Following the success of the First International Timetabling Competition in 2002, the timetabling research community is organising a new competition on this problem (opening July 22nd). This new competition will be on three different timetabling problems, and one of the tracks concerns the course timetabling formulation that applies to Italian universities (called Curriculum-based Course Timeta...

Automated timetabling is a research domain that has occupied many researchers over the last 50 years. Several algorithms have proven to be applicable to timetabling but they are nearly all designed to address specific problems. The framework presented in this paper is a step towards a generic semi-automatic timetabling tool. The basis of the framework is an ontology for timetabling that we desi...

Speed trajectories, timetable and the layout of neutral sections are key elements that affect train energy consumption (EC). This paper combines microscopic energy-efficient control (EETC), macroscopic timetabling (EETT) location planning (NSLP), to achieve minimum EC in bi-directional high-speed railway. An integrated model is first established based on distribution model, a multi-phase model....