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Minimal Perturbation in University Timetabling with Maximum Satisfiability

EasyChair Preprint no. 2821

17 pagesDate: February 29, 2020

Abstract

Every new academic year, scheduling new timetables due to disruptions is a major problem for universities. However, computing a new timetable from scratch may be unnecessarily expensive. Furthermore, this process may produce a significantly different timetable which in many cases is undesirable for all parties involved. For this reason, we aim to find a new feasible timetable while minimizing the number of perturbations to the original disrupted timetable.

The contribution of this paper is a maximum satisfiability (MaxSAT) encoding to solve large and complex university timetabling problem instances which can be subject to disruptions. To validate the MaxSAT encoding, we evaluate university timetabling real-world instances from the International Timetabling Competition (ITC) 2019. We use the originally found solutions as a starting point to evaluate the capacity of the proposed MaxSAT encoding to find a new solution with minimal perturbation. Overall, our model is able to efficiently solve the disrupted instances.

Keyphrases: MaxSAT, Minimal Perturbation, university timetabling

BibTeX entry
BibTeX does not have the right entry for preprints. This is a hack for producing the correct reference:
@Booklet{EasyChair:2821,
  author = {Alexandre Lemos and Pedro T. Monteiro and Inês Lynce},
  title = {Minimal Perturbation in University Timetabling with Maximum Satisfiability},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 2821},

  year = {EasyChair, 2020}}
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