A common weakness of local search metaheuristics, such as Simulated Annealing, in solving combinatorial optimisation problems, is the necessity of setting a certain number of parameters. This tends to make significantly increase the total amount of time required to solve the problem and often requires a high level of experience from the user. This paper is motivated by the goal of overcoming th...

We present a study of the university post-enrolment timetabling problem, proposed as Track 2 of the 2007 International Timetabling Competition. We approach the problem using several techniques, particularly local search, constraint programming techniques and hybrids of these in the form of a large neighbourhood search scheme. Our local search approach won the competition. Our best constraint pr...

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...

The university course timetabling problem is an optimisation problem in which a set of events has to be scheduled in timeslots and located in suitable rooms. Recently, a set of benchmark instances was introduced and used for an ‘International Timetabling Competition’ to which 24 algorithms were submitted by various research groups active in the field of timetabling. We describe and analyse a hy...

In many real-life optimisation problems, there are multiple interacting components in a solution. For example, different components might specify assignments to different kinds of resource. Often, each component is associated with different sets of soft constraints, and so with different measures of soft constraint violation. The goal is then to minimise a linear combination of such measures. T...

This paper reports the design and implementation of a PC-based computer system to aid the construction of a combined university course±examination timetable. The speci®c diculties to be faced are the restricted availability of classrooms and the increased ̄exibility of the studentsÕ choices of courses, which makes the problem very tight. The system uses an integer programming (IP) model that a...