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An overview of curriculum-based course timetabling

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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.

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Notes

  1. Contributed by Moritz Mühlenthaler.

  2. http://www.easystaff.it.

  3. Visualized on 9 October 2014.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the ITC-2002 and ITC-2007 organizers for providing the benchmark instances and the formal description of the CB-CTT, as well as Alex Bonutti, Luca Di Gaspero and Andrea Schaerf who maintain the website. We would like to thank Miguel A. Goberna, the editor of TOP, for the invitation to write this paper. We would also like to thank Roberto Asín, Edmund K. Burke, John H. Drake, Marco Lübbecke, Barry McCollum, Ender Özcan and Andrea Schaerf for their insightful comments on the first version of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DEI, University of Bologna, Viale Risorgimento 2, 40136, Bologna, Italy

    Andrea Bettinelli, Valentina Cacchiani & Paolo Toth

  2. Department of Transport, Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Kgs, Lyngby, Denmark

    Roberto Roberti

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  1. Andrea Bettinelli
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  2. Valentina Cacchiani
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  3. Roberto Roberti
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  4. Paolo Toth
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Correspondence to Paolo Toth.

Additional information

This invited paper is discussed in the comments available at doi:10.1007/s11750-015-0362-3, doi:10.1007/s11750-015-0363-2, doi:10.1007/s11750-015-0364-1, doi:10.1007/s11750-015-0365-0.

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Bettinelli, A., Cacchiani, V., Roberti, R. et al. An overview of curriculum-based course timetabling. TOP 23, 313–349 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11750-015-0366-z

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