Three Phase Approach For Curriculum Based Course Timetabling Problem

Three-phase Approach for Curriculum-based Course Timetabling Problem

Fairness in Academic Course Timetabling

This monograph deals with theoretical and practical aspects of creating course timetables at academic institutions. The task is typically to create a timetable that suits the requirements of the stakeholders – students, lecturers, and the administration – as well as possible. The book presents an exposition of the basic combinatorial problems and solution methods for course timetabling and related tasks. It provides a rigorous treatment of fairness issues that arise in the course timetabling context and shows how to deal with the potentially conflicting interests of the stakeholders. The proposed methods are also readily applicable to other classes of scheduling problems such as staff rostering. Finally, it presents a comprehensive case study on the implementation of an automated course timetabling system at the school of engineering of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. The case study includes a detailed description of the problem model as well as an evaluation of stakeholder satisfaction.

Automated Scheduling and Planning

Solving scheduling problems has long presented a challenge for computer scientists and operations researchers. The field continues to expand as researchers and practitioners examine ever more challenging problems and develop automated methods capable of solving them. This book provides 11 case studies in automated scheduling, submitted by leading researchers from across the world. Each case study examines a challenging real-world problem by analysing the problem in detail before investigating how the problem may be solved using state of the art techniques.The areas covered include aircraft scheduling, microprocessor instruction scheduling, sports fixture scheduling, exam scheduling, personnel scheduling and production scheduling. Problem solving methodologies covered include exact as well as (meta)heuristic approaches, such as local search techniques, linear programming, genetic algorithms and ant colony optimisation.The field of automated scheduling has the potential to impact many aspects of our lives and work; this book highlights contributions to the field by world class researchers.