Measurability and reproducibility in university timetabling research: discussion and proposals

Authors:
Andrea Schaerf;Luca Di Gaspero
Affiliations:
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettrica, Gestionale e Meccanica Università degli Studi di Udine, Udine, Italy;Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettrica, Gestionale e Meccanica Università degli Studi di Udine, Udine, Italy
Venue:
PATAT'06 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Practice and theory of automated timetabling VI
Year:
2006

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Abstract

In this paper, we first discuss the level of compliance for timetabling research to two important research qualities, namely measurability and reproducibility, analyzing what we believe are the most important contributions in the literature. Secondly, we discuss some practices that, in our opinion, could contribute to the improvement on the two aforementioned qualities for future papers in timetabling research. For the sake of brevity, we restrict our scope to university timetabling problems (exams, courses, or events), and thus we leave out other equally important timetabling problems, such as high-school, employee, and transportation timetabling.