University Timetabling

University timetabling problems can be classified into two main categories: course and examination timetabling. We discuss the problem statements and constraints for each of them and provide an overview of some recent research advances that have been made by the authors and members of their research team. We particularly concentrate upon: • Meta-heuristic approaches that are less dependent upon parameter settings than many approaches in the literature. We also consider approaches that employ parameters that are useful to real world users. • Multicriteria approaches that handle vectors of criteria rather than employing a single evaluation function which is a summation of all criteria violations. • Case-based reasoning approaches which use previously employed knowledge and experience in solving new timetabling problems in two ways: as a solution reuse and as a methodology reuse. • Hyper-heuristics and self adaptive approaches that aim to raise the level of generality of existing heuristic and meta-heuristic methods-which are usually tailor made for a specific problem. Such approaches consider information which helps in choosing heuristics for the problem in hand rather than solving the problem directly. We point out that the above themes are not disjoint from each other and, indeed, that there is considerable overlap between them. 2