In this study we have tackled the NP-hard problem of academic class scheduling (or timetabling) at the university level. We have investigated a variety of approaches based on simulated annealing, including mean-field annealing, simulated annealing with three different cooling schedules, and the use of a rule-based preprocessor to provide a good initial solution for annealing. The best results w...

This paper presents a hybrid evolutionary algorithm to tackle university course timetabling problems. The proposed approach is an extension of a non-linear great deluge algorithm in which evolutionary operators are incorporated. First, we generate a population of feasible solutions using a tailored process that incorporates heuristics for graph colouring and assignment problems. That initialisa...

Student sectioning is the problem of assigning students to particular sections of courses they request while respecting constraints such as course structures, section limits, and reserved spaces. Students may also provide preferences on class times and course alternatives. In this paper, three approaches to this problem are examined and combined in order to tackle it on a practical level: stude...

Preferential rules occur very often in application domains like timetabling. Besides absolutely valid rules like “Ground courses have to start in the morning in one of the main lecture rooms”, there are very often preferential rules like “A wish for the starting time of a lecture should be satisfied with less deviations” or “A wish for a room of a lecture should be satisfied if possible”. Our a...

University timetabling (UTT) is a complex problem due to its combinatorial nature but also the type of constraints involved. The holy grail of (constraint) programming: ”the user states the problem the program solves it” remains a challenge since solution quality is tightly coupled with deriving ”effective models”, best handled by technology experts. In this paper, focusing on the field of univ...