An exact based approach for the Post Enrollment Course Timetabling Problem

Abstract

Educational timetabling has long piqued the interest of the scheduling community. Since timetabling governs how universities operate daily, it has been vital in academia to put substantial effort into creating schedules of the highest caliber. To create schedules that satisfy all stakeholders, various approaches have been tried to solve educational timetabling problems, which are typically NP-Hard. Over the past 20 years, several scheduling contests have been held with a focus on issues related to educational operations. In this paper, we focus on the Post Enrollment Course Timetabling Problem and two datasets from the International Timetabling Competitions held in 2002 and 2007. We propose a local search procedure augmented by a base mathematical model and variations of this model that yields competitive results, within reasonable execution times, to some of the best-known solutions.