IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/annopr/v302y2021i2d10.1007_s10479-019-03382-0.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Decomposition of university course timetabling

Author

Listed:
  • Britta Herres

    (Hochschule Trier)

  • Heinz Schmitz

    (Hochschule Trier)

Abstract

Suppose we like to find non-overlapping periods for a set of events which may have multiple teachers assigned, is this easy or hard in terms of complexity? Or assume that only a single teacher is fixed per event, but we like to allocate rooms and periods simultaneously. What if a single teacher and a room is already given and we look for periods alone? And how do requests of teachers for specific rooms or additional student conflicts change the computational complexities of these questions from university course timetabling (UCT)? We provide a complete hard/easy-list of all UCT subproblems derived from a typical set of hard constraints. We obtain this list with a systematic study of the fine structure of UCT in terms of complexity w.r.t. the order in which rooms, periods and teachers are assigned to events. These kind of subproblems appear in practice when some entities in a timetable are fixed while the assignments of others are (re-)computed, and they also appear as necessary conditions for the existence of feasible timetables. Moreover, we identify which of the seemingly different subproblems are essentially the same computational tasks by reducing them to the same bipartite assignment problem, and we discuss some variations of constraints.

Suggested Citation

  • Britta Herres & Heinz Schmitz, 2021. "Decomposition of university course timetabling," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 302(2), pages 405-423, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:annopr:v:302:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s10479-019-03382-0
    DOI: 10.1007/s10479-019-03382-0
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10479-019-03382-0
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10479-019-03382-0?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jeffrey Kingston, 2014. "Timetable construction: the algorithms and complexity perspective," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 218(1), pages 249-259, July.
    2. Gerald Lach & Marco Lübbecke, 2012. "Curriculum based course timetabling: new solutions to Udine benchmark instances," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 194(1), pages 255-272, April.
    3. Asratian, A. S. & de Werra, D., 2002. "A generalized class-teacher model for some timetabling problems," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 143(3), pages 531-542, December.
    4. David Schindl, 2019. "Optimal student sectioning on mandatory courses with various sections numbers," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 275(1), pages 209-221, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Alexandre Lemos & Pedro T. Monteiro & Inês Lynce, 2022. "Introducing UniCorT: an iterative university course timetabling tool with MaxSAT," Journal of Scheduling, Springer, vol. 25(4), pages 371-390, August.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Esmaeilbeigi, Rasul & Mak-Hau, Vicky & Yearwood, John & Nguyen, Vivian, 2022. "The multiphase course timetabling problem," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 300(3), pages 1098-1119.
    2. Mats Carlsson & Sara Ceschia & Luca Gaspero & Rasmus Ørnstrup Mikkelsen & Andrea Schaerf & Thomas Jacob Riis Stidsen, 2023. "Exact and metaheuristic methods for a real-world examination timetabling problem," Journal of Scheduling, Springer, vol. 26(4), pages 353-367, August.
    3. Andrea Bettinelli & Valentina Cacchiani & Roberto Roberti & Paolo Toth, 2015. "An overview of curriculum-based course timetabling," TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, Springer;Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, vol. 23(2), pages 313-349, July.
    4. Alexandre Lemos & Pedro T. Monteiro & Inês Lynce, 2022. "Introducing UniCorT: an iterative university course timetabling tool with MaxSAT," Journal of Scheduling, Springer, vol. 25(4), pages 371-390, August.
    5. Massimiliano Caramia & Stefano Giordani, 2020. "Curriculum-Based Course Timetabling with Student Flow, Soft Constraints, and Smoothing Objectives: an Application to a Real Case Study," SN Operations Research Forum, Springer, vol. 1(2), pages 1-21, June.
    6. De Causmaecker, Patrick & Demeester, Peter & Vanden Berghe, Greet, 2009. "A decomposed metaheuristic approach for a real-world university timetabling problem," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 195(1), pages 307-318, May.
    7. Dönmez, Kadir & Demirel, Soner & Özdemir, Mustafa, 2020. "Handling the pseudo pilot assignment problem in air traffic control training by using NASA TLX," Journal of Air Transport Management, Elsevier, vol. 89(C).
    8. Alejandro Cataldo & Juan-Carlos Ferrer & Jaime Miranda & Pablo A. Rey & Antoine Sauré, 2017. "An integer programming approach to curriculum-based examination timetabling," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 258(2), pages 369-393, November.
    9. Thepphakorn, Thatchai & Pongcharoen, Pupong & Hicks, Chris, 2014. "An ant colony based timetabling tool," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 149(C), pages 131-144.
    10. Marco Lübbecke, 2015. "Comments on: An overview of curriculum-based course timetabling," TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, Springer;Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, vol. 23(2), pages 359-361, July.
    11. Jaime Miranda, 2010. "eClasSkeduler: A Course Scheduling System for the Executive Education Unit at the Universidad de Chile," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 40(3), pages 196-207, June.
    12. Niels-Christian F. Bagger & Simon Kristiansen & Matias Sørensen & Thomas R. Stidsen, 2019. "Flow formulations for curriculum-based course timetabling," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 280(1), pages 121-150, September.
    13. Al-Yakoob, Salem M. & Sherali, Hanif D., 2007. "A mixed-integer programming approach to a class timetabling problem: A case study with gender policies and traffic considerations," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 180(3), pages 1028-1044, August.
    14. Salem Al-Yakoob & Hanif Sherali, 2015. "A column generation mathematical programming approach for a class-faculty assignment problem with preferences," Computational Management Science, Springer, vol. 12(2), pages 297-318, April.
    15. Bagger, Niels-Christian F. & Sørensen, Matias & Stidsen, Thomas R., 2019. "Dantzig–Wolfe decomposition of the daily course pattern formulation for curriculum-based course timetabling," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 272(2), pages 430-446.
    16. Fabian Dunke & Stefan Nickel, 2023. "A matheuristic for customized multi-level multi-criteria university timetabling," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 328(2), pages 1313-1348, September.
    17. Mutsunori Banbara & Katsumi Inoue & Benjamin Kaufmann & Tenda Okimoto & Torsten Schaub & Takehide Soh & Naoyuki Tamura & Philipp Wanko, 2019. "$${\varvec{teaspoon}}$$ teaspoon : solving the curriculum-based course timetabling problems with answer set programming," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 275(1), pages 3-37, April.
    18. Zhang, Defu & Liu, Yongkai & M'Hallah, Rym & Leung, Stephen C.H., 2010. "A simulated annealing with a new neighborhood structure based algorithm for high school timetabling problems," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 203(3), pages 550-558, June.
    19. Biniyam Asmare Kassa, 2015. "Implementing a Class-Scheduling System at the College of Business and Economics of Bahir Dar University, Ethiopia," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 45(3), pages 203-215, June.
    20. Lindahl, Michael & Mason, Andrew J. & Stidsen, Thomas & Sørensen, Matias, 2018. "A strategic view of University timetabling," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 266(1), pages 35-45.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:annopr:v:302:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s10479-019-03382-0. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.