Practical relaxation of a special case of the Curriculum-Based Course Timetabling problem

Abstract

The Curriculum-Based Course Timetabling (CB-CTT) problem involves the task of scheduling lectures of courses to classrooms, considering teacher availability, a specified curricula, and a set of constraints. In the Polytechnic University of Victoria (PUV), Mexico, the CB-CTT problem occurs with the additional constraints that the courses must be assigned to teachers and that a teacher cannot teach more than one course in the same curriculum. This document proposes a methodology to solve this special case CB-CTT problem. The main contributions derived from the research are: (a) the solution of the special case of the CB-CTT problem; (b) the use of a Simulated Annealing based methodology, which relaxes the problem into three simpler subproblems (the assignment, distribution, and scheduling of courses), to reduce the search space and speed up the construction of a solution; and (c) the solution of a real world instance using the proposed methodology. The results show that the approach can construct solutions for the problem in the PUV in a few minutes, and of a similar quality to those manually constructed in a couple of weeks.