Educational timetabling

Abstract

This chapter is an introduction to the problems of timetabling educational institutions such as high schools and universities. These are large problems with multiple sources of NP-completeness, for which robust solvers do not yet exist, although steady progress is being made. This chapter presents the three main problems found in the literature: high school timetabling, university examination timetabling, and university course timetabling. It also examines some major subproblems of these problems: student sectioning, single student timetabling, and room assignment. This chapter also shows how real-world instances of these problems, with their many constraints, can be modelled in full detail, using a case study in high school timetabling as an example. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.