Solving the International Timetabling Competition: a Deterministic Approach

Abstract

The Course Timetabling Problem consists of the weekly scheduling of lectures of a collection of university courses, subject to certain constraints. The International Timetabling Competitions, ITC-2002 and ITC-2007, have been organized with the aim of creating a common formulation for comparison of solution proposals. This paper discusses the design and implementation of an extendable family of sorting-based mechanisms, called Sort Then Fix (STF) algorithms. ITC-2002 and ITC-2007 Post Enrolment based Course Timetabling problem instances were used in this study. The STF approach is deterministic, and does not require swapping or backtracking. Almost all solutions run in less than 10% of the ITC-2002 and less than 2% of the ITC-2007 benchmark times, respectively.