Resource assignment in high school timetabling

Abstract

This paper explores one aspect of the high school timetabling problem, namely the assignment of resources, such as teachers and rooms, to meetings after times are assigned. Several algorithms, with run times of just a few seconds, are presented and tested on real-world data. The best of these is currently in operation within KTS, a free, public web site for high school timetabling created by the author. A large bipartite matching model, called the global tixel matching, is used to preserve optimality of one key measure of quality as resource assignment proceeds.