The university course timetabling problem deals with the task of scheduling lectures of a set of university courses into a given number of rooms and time periods, taking into account various hard and soft constraints. The goal of the International Timetabling Competitions ITC2002 and ITC2007 was to establish models for comparison that cover the most frequently found use cases. Our model, motiva...

University timetabling problems are a yearly challenging task and faced repeatedly each semester. The considered non-polynomial time (NP) combinatorial optimization (COP), which means that they can be solved through algorithms to produce the aspired optimal timetable. Several techniques have been used solve university problems, most of them use techniques. This paper provides comprehensive revi...

The work presented in this thesis concerns the problem of timetabling at universities – particularly course-timetabling, and examines the various ways in which metaheuristic techniques might be applied to these sorts of problems. Using a popular benchmark version of a university course timetabling problem, we examine the implications of using a “twostaged” algorithmic approach, whereby in stage...

The university course timetabling problem is hard and time-consuming to solve. Profits from full automatisation of this process can be invaluable. This paper describes architecture and operation of two automatic timetabling systems. Both are based on evolutionary algorithms, with specialised genetic operators and penalty-based evaluation function. The paper covers two problem variations (theore...

This paper presents an innovative approach to curriculum-based timetabling. Curricula are defined by a rich model that includes optional courses and course groups among which students are expected to take a subset of courses. Transformation of the curriculum model into the enrollment model is proposed and a local search algorithm generating corresponding enrollments is introduced. This enables ...

A mobile multi-agent system is proposed to create solutions for the university course timetabling problem. It is composed of four kinds of agents: (mobile) Course Agents, and (stationary) Signboard, Publisher and Interface Agents. The key strength of this new approach is to use a fundamental attribute of Agents that of autonomy. This autonomy is manifested in this work in the Course Agent. Each...

A mobile multi-agent system is proposed to create solutions for the university course timetabling problem. It is composed of four kinds of agents: (mobile) Course Agents, and (stationary) Signboard, Publisher and Interface Agents. The key strength of this new approach is to use a fundamental attribute of Agents that of autonomy. This autonomy is manifested in this work in the Course Agent. Each...

Classical notions of disjunctive and cumulative scheduling are studied from the point of view of soft constraint satisfaction. Soft disjunctive scheduling is introduced as an instance of soft CSP and preferences included in this problem are applied to generate a lower bound based on existing discrete capacity resource. Timetabling problems at Purdue University and Faculty of Informatics at Masa...