The university course timetabling is known to be a highly constrained optimization problem, more complex than examination timetabling. Many different approaches, including evolutionary algorithms, tabu search, simulated annealing, and their hybrids, are developed for solving the problem. The negative selection algorithm, an algorithm inspired by the immune system, has successfully been applied ...

In this contribution a comparative study of modern heuristics on the school timetabling problem is presented. More precisely, we investigate the application of two population-based algorithms, namely a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and an Artificial Fish Swarm (AFS), on the high school timetabling problem. In order to demonstrate their efficiency and performance, experiments with real-world...

Timetabling problems are often hard and time-consuming to solve. Profits from full automatization of this process can be invaluable. Although over the years many solutions have been proposed, most of the methods concern only one problem instance or class. This paper describes a possibly universal method for solving large, highly constrained timetabling problems from different areas. The solutio...

This paper describes our work on applying novel techniques based on propositional satisfiability (SAT) solvers and optimizers to the Curriculum-based Course Timetabling problem. Out of 32 standard benchmark instances derived from the Second International Timetabling Competition held in 2007, our techniques yield the best known solutions for 21 of them (19 of them being optimal), improving the p...

In this abstract we present a new exam timetabling algorithm together with a set of results on the university exam timetabling problems from the University of Toronto collection, available at ftp://ftp.mie.utoronto.ca/pub/carter/testprob/. A number of recent papers have studied these problems e.g. Carter et al. [7], Caramia et al. [6], Casey & Thompson [8], Abdullah et al. [1], Burke et al. [2]...

This paper describes the results of a questionnaire on examination timetabling sent to the registrars of ninety five British Universities. The survey asked questions in three specific categories. Firstly, universities were asked about the nature of their examination timetabling problem: how many people, rooms, periods are involved and what difficulties are associated with the problem? Secondly,...

The High School Timetabling Problem consists in assigning timeslots and resources to events, satisfying constraints which heavily depend on the specific institution. This work deals with the problem of the ongoing III International Timetabling Competition (ITC), which includes a diverse set of instances from many educational institutions around the world. We proposed an approach based on Simula...

We consider the problem of planning annual timetable for all freight trains in Germany simultaneously. That is, each train, construct a slot through network such that no two slots different have conflict. denote this task by Train Path Assignment Problem (TPAP) and present column generation approach where iteratively, set possible grows. In iteration, we look maximum subset without any conflict...

Automated high school timetabling is a challenging task. This problem is a well known hard computational problem which has been of interest to practitioners as well as researchers. High schools need to timetable their regular activities once per year, or even more frequently. The exact solvers may fail to find a solution for a given instance of the problem. A selection hyper-heuristic can be de...