Timetabling problems emerge in many variations [9], depending on the nature of the assignments involved (exam timetabling, course timetabling, school timetabling and others), as well as, the characteristics of the institution and the set of constraints assumed. In this communication we focus on a particular school timetabling problem the Class/Teacher Timetabling Problem (CTTP) that will be des...

The timetabling problem consists in fixing a sequence of meetings between teachers and students in a given period of time, satisfying a set of different constraints. There are a number of different versions of the timetabling problem. These include school timetabling (where students are grouped in classes with similar degree plans), university timetabling (where students are considered individu...

When timetabling experts are faced with a new timetabling problem, they usually develop a very specialised and optimised solution for this new underlying problem. One disadvantage of this strategy is that even slight changes of the problem description often cause a complete redesign of data structures and algorithms. Furthermore, other timetabling problems cannot be fit to the data structures p...

This paper presents our work on analysing high level heuristics within a graph based hyper-heuristic framework. Local search based methods (Tabu Search and steepest descent method) are compared as the high level heuristics within the graph based hyper-heuristic framework and the analysis of their neighborhood structures and performance on the high level landscape is carried out. An iterated ste...

Timetabling is a typical application of constraint programming whose task is to allocate activities to slots in available resources respecting various constraints like precedence and capacity. In this paper we present a basic concept, a constraint model, and a solution algorithm for interactive timetabling. Interactive timetabling combines automated timetabling (the computer allocates the activ...

General Optimization Methods Mathematical Programming, Constraint Programming, Heuristics Problem Specific Algorithms (Dynamic Programming, Branch and Bound) Scheduling Single and Parallel Machine Models Flow Shops and Flexible Flow Shops Job Shops Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Timetabling Interval Scheduling, Reservations Educational Timetabling Workforce and Employee Timetabling Tra...

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...

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...