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An overview of curriculum-based course timetabling

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  • Andrea Bettinelli
  • Valentina Cacchiani
  • Roberto Roberti
  • Paolo Toth

Abstract

In 2007, the Second International Timetabling Competition (ITC-2007) has been organized and a formal definition of the Curriculum-Based Course Timetabling (CB-CTT) problem has been given, by taking into account several real-world constraints and objectives while keeping the problem general. CB-CTT consists of finding the best weekly assignment of university course lectures to rooms and time periods. A feasible schedule must satisfy a set of hard constraints and must also take into account a set of soft constraints, whose violation produces penalty terms to be minimized in the objective function. From ITC-2007, many researchers have developed advanced models and methods to solve CB-CTT. This survey is devoted to review the main works on the topic, with focus on mathematical models, lower bounds, and exact and heuristic algorithms. Besides giving an overview of these approaches, we highlight interesting extensions that could make the study of CB-CTT even more challenging and closer to reality. Copyright Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa 2015

Suggested Citation

  • 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.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:topjnl:v:23:y:2015:i:2:p:313-349
    DOI: 10.1007/s11750-015-0366-z
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Cristian D. Palma & Patrick Bornhardt, 2020. "Considering Section Balance in an Integer Optimization Model for the Curriculum-Based Course Timetabling Problem," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 8(10), pages 1-12, October.
    2. Ceschia, Sara & Di Gaspero, Luca & Schaerf, Andrea, 2023. "Educational timetabling: Problems, benchmarks, and state-of-the-art results," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 308(1), pages 1-18.
    3. Alexander Kiefer & Richard F. Hartl & Alexander Schnell, 2017. "Adaptive large neighborhood search for the curriculum-based course timetabling problem," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 252(2), pages 255-282, May.
    4. Alexandre Lemos & Pedro T. Monteiro & Inês Lynce, 2021. "Disruptions in timetables: a case study at Universidade de Lisboa," Journal of Scheduling, Springer, vol. 24(1), pages 35-48, February.
    5. 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.
    6. Kadri Sylejmani & Edon Gashi & Adrian Ymeri, 2023. "Simulated annealing with penalization for university course timetabling," Journal of Scheduling, Springer, vol. 26(5), pages 497-517, October.
    7. P. Solano Cutillas & D. Pérez-Perales & M. M. E. Alemany Díaz, 2022. "A mathematical programming tool for an efficient decision-making on teaching assignment under non-regular time schedules," Operational Research, Springer, vol. 22(3), pages 2899-2942, July.
    8. Seizinger, Markus & Brunner, Jens O., 2023. "Optimized planning of nursing curricula in dual vocational schools focusing on the German health care system," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 304(3), pages 1223-1241.
    9. 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.
    10. Michael Lindahl & Matias Sørensen & Thomas R. Stidsen, 2018. "A fix-and-optimize matheuristic for university timetabling," Journal of Heuristics, Springer, vol. 24(4), pages 645-665, August.
    11. 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.
    12. Niels-Christian Fink Bagger & Guy Desaulniers & Jacques Desrosiers, 2019. "Daily course pattern formulation and valid inequalities for the curriculum-based course timetabling problem," Journal of Scheduling, Springer, vol. 22(2), pages 155-172, April.
    13. Efstratios Rappos & Eric Thiémard & Stephan Robert & Jean-François Hêche, 2022. "A mixed-integer programming approach for solving university course timetabling problems," Journal of Scheduling, Springer, vol. 25(4), pages 391-404, August.
    14. 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.
    15. 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.
    16. 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.
    17. 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.
    18. Lindahl, Michael & Stidsen, Thomas & Sørensen, Matias, 2019. "Quality recovering of university timetables," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 276(2), pages 422-435.
    19. Rasmus Ø. Mikkelsen & Dennis S. Holm, 2022. "A parallelized matheuristic for the International Timetabling Competition 2019," Journal of Scheduling, Springer, vol. 25(4), pages 429-452, August.

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