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International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling

PATAT 2000: Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling III pp 28–47Cite as

A Generic Object-Oriented Constraint-Based Model for University Course Timetabling

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2079))

Abstract

The construction of course timetables for academic institutions is a very difficult problem with a lot of constraints that have to be respected and a huge search space to be explored, even if the size of the problem input is not significantly large, due to the exponential number of the possible feasible timetables. On the other hand, the problem itself does not have a widely approved definition, since different variations of it are faced by different departments. However, there exists a set of entities and constraints among them which are common to every possible instantiation of the timetabling problem. In this paper, we present a model of this common core in terms of Ilog Solver, a constraint programming object-oriented C++ library, and we show the way this model may be extended to cover the needs of a specific academic unit.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, University of Athens, Panepistimiopolis, 157 84, Athens, Greece

    Kyriakos Zervoudakis & Panagiotis Stamatopoulos

Authors
  1. Kyriakos Zervoudakis
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  2. Panagiotis Stamatopoulos
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Information Technology Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning Research Group, University of Nottingham, Jubilee Campus,Wollaton Road, NG8 1BB, Nottingham, UK

    Edmund Burke

  2. Department of Computer Science, FH Konstanz, University of Applied Science, Brauneggerstr. 55, 78462, Konstanz, Germany

    Wilhelm Erben

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Zervoudakis, K., Stamatopoulos, P. (2001). A Generic Object-Oriented Constraint-Based Model for University Course Timetabling. In: Burke, E., Erben, W. (eds) Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling III. PATAT 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2079. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44629-X_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44629-X_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42421-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44629-3

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