The construction of course timetables for academic institutions is a very difficult problem with a lot of constraints that have to be respected and a huge search space to be explored, even if the size of the problem input is not significantly large, due to the exponential number of the possible feasible timetables. On the other hand, the problem itself does not have a widely approved definition...

Exam timetabling is one of the most important administrative activities in universities (e.g. [4], [8], and [19]). Such problems have been the subject of significant research effort across Artificial Intelligence research and Operational Research since the 1960s. A general exam timetabling problem consists of assigning a set of exams into a limited number of timeslots while satisfying a set of ...

Optimization problems, such as resource allocation or scheduling, often involves different entities, such as departments or production units, which might have different constraints and objectives, but are interested in cooperating. In this presentation, we survey various scenarios and the solutions proposed in the literature for this kind of situations. We start from simple distributed constrai...

Train timetabling is a process of assigning suitable arrival and departure times to trains at the stations they visit and at key track junctions. It is desirable that the timetable focusses on passenger preferences and is operationally viable and profitable for the Train Operating Companies (TOCs). Many hard and soft constraints need to be considered relating to the track capacities, set of tra...

The idea of decomposition has been successfully applied to address large combinatorial optimization problems across a range of applications. However, in timetabling, it has not been widely applied. One major difficulty of course, is that early assignment in one sub-problem may lead to later conflict in solving interrelated sub-problems. In our previous work, timetabling problems were adaptively...