A Heuristic Incremental Modelling Approach to Course Timetabling.pdfVIP

A Heuristic Incremental Mo deling Approach to Course Timetabling 1 1 2 Don Banks Peter van Beek and Amnon Meisels 1 Department of Computing Science University of Alb erta Edmonton Alb erta Canada TG H fbanksvanbe ekgcs ualbertaca 2 Department of Mathematics and Computer Science BenGurion University of the Negev BeerSheva Israel amcsbgu acil Abstract The general timetabling problem is an assignment of activ ities to xed time intervals adhering to a predened set of resource availabili ti es Timetabling problems are dicult to solve and can b e ex tremely timeconsuming without some computer assistance In this pap er the application of constraintbased reasoning to timetable generation is examined Sp ecically we consider how a timetabling problem can b e represented as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem CSP and prop ose an algorithm for its solution which improves up on the basic idea of back tracking Normally when a backtracking routine fails to nd a solution there is nothing of value returned to the user however our algorithm extends this pro cess by iteratively adding constraints to the CSP repre sentation A generalized random mo del of timetabling problems is pro p osed This mo del creates a diverse range of problem instances which are used to verify our search algorithm and identify the characteristics of dicult timetabling problems Intro duction Timetabling problems arise in many real world situations