Timetabling the courses offered at the Computer Science Department of the University of Munich requires the processing of hard and soft constraints. Hard constraints are conditions that must be satisfied, soft constraints, however, may be violated, but should be satisfied as much as possible. This paper shows how to model our timetabling problem as a partial constraint satisfaction problem and ...

This paper describes a case study on a generalpurpose Constraint Relaxation Problem solver, COASTOOL. Using COASTOOL,~ problem can be solved merely by declaring “what is the problem,” without programming “how to solve it.” The problem is solved by a novel method that generates a high-quality initial assignment using arc-consistency, and refines it using hillclimbing. This approach has been eval...

Arranging a lecture/tutorial/lab timetable in a large university department or school is a hard problem faced continually in educational establishments. We describe how this problem has been solved in one institution via the use of evolutionary algorithms. The technique extends easily and straightforwardly to any lecture timetabling problem. Although there may be more eeective ways to handle pa...

This paper investigates a hybridisation of the very large neighbourhood search approach with local search methods to address examination timetabling problems. In this paper, we describe a 2 phase approach. The first phase employs “multi start” to carry out search upon a very large neighbourhood of solutions using graph theoretical algorithms implemented on an improvement graph. The second phase...

This work presents a constructive approach to the process of fixing a sequence of meetings between teachers and students in a prefixed period of time, satisfying a set of constraints of various types, known as school timetabling problem. The problem is modeled as a bi-objective problem used as a basis to construct feasible assignments of teachers to classes on specified timeslots. A new represe...

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...

A number of modelling languages for timetabling have been proposed to standardise the specification of problems, solutions and their data formats. These languages have not been adopted as standard due to not simplifying the modelling process, lack of features and offering little advantage over traditional programming languages. In contrast to this approach we propose a new language-independent ...

Ametaheuristic-based algorithm is presented for the post enrolment-based course timetabling problem used in track-2 of the Second International Timetabling Competition (ITC2007). The featured algorithm operates in three distinct stages – a constructive phase followed by two separate phases of simulated annealing – and is time dependent, due to the fact that various run-time parameters are calcu...

This paper deals with the Lecture and Tutorial Timetabling Problem at an institution in a Tunisian University. Our objective is to construct a feasible timetable for all lectures and tutorials taken by different groups of each subsection of any section in the institution. For this, we describe the timetabling problem of the institution considered and list all specific hard and soft constraints....

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...