Evolutionary Scheduling

Abstract

In this chapter we consider the NP-complete problem of university course timetabling. We note that it is often difficult to gain a deep understanding of these sorts of problems due to the fact that so many different types of constraints can ultimately be considered for inclusion in any particular application. Consequently we conduct a detailed analysis of a benchmark problem version that is slightly simplified, but also contains many of the features that make these sorts of problems "hard". We review a number of the algorithms that have been proposed for this particular problem, and also present a detailed description and analysis of an example algorithm that we show is able to perform well across a range of benchmark instances. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.