Curriculum based course timetabling: Optimal solutions to the Udine benchmark instances

G. Lach and M.E. Lübbecke

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Integer Programming; Decomposition; Timetabling

We present an integer programming approach to the university course timetabling problem, in which weekly lectures have to be scheduled and assigned to rooms. Students" curricula impose restrictions as to which courses may be scheduled in parallel. Besides some hard constraints (no two courses in the same room at the same time, etc.), there are several soft constraints in practice which give a convenient structure to timetables; these should be met as well as possible.

We report on solving benchmark instances from two International Timetabling Competitions which are based on real data from the university of Udine. The first set is solved to proven optimality, for the second set we give solutions which do not violate any hard constraints. We further present solutions to larger instances with more elaborate hard constraints from TU Berlin, Germany.

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