The Second International Timetabling Competition (ITC-2007) Curriculum-based Course Timetab.pdf

The Second International Timetabling Competition (ITC-2007): Curriculum-based Course Timetabling Track — preliminary presentation — Luca Di Gaspero1, Barry McCollum2, and Andrea Schaerf1 1 DIEGM, University of Udine via delle Scienze 208, I-33100, Udine, Italy {l.digaspero | schaerf}@uniud.it 2 School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen’s University SARC Building, Belfast, United Kingdom b.mccollum@qub.ac.uk Abstract. Following the success of the First International Timetabling Competition in 2002, the timetabling research community is organising a new competition on this problem (opening June 1st). This new com- petition will be on three different timetabling problems, and one of the tracks concerns the course timetabling formulation that applies to Italian universities (called Curriculum-based Course Timetabling). The dataset is composed by real-world instances provided by the University of Udine. In this work, we overview the general rules of the competition and we describe in details the problem formulation and the instances proposed for this track. 1 Introduction Timetabling within Universities has long been recognised as a difficult combi- natorial problem of practical relevance. Whether it be timetabling exams or courses, much (human or computing) effort is spent for producing solutions that are workable and of a high quality (see, e.g., [5]). The First International Timetabling Competition (ITC-2002), which was or- ganised by the International Metaheuristic Network, attracted 24 feasible sub- missions from all over the world. Information relating to the problem definition, instances, rules, and solution evaluation of ITC-2002 is available at the webpage http://www.idsia.ch/Files/ttcomp2002/. The ITC-2002 was based on a problem formulation specifically proposed for the competition, and on a set of artificially generated instances, but it contained many of the characteristics found in certain university settings. Thanks to the co