Timetabling problems at the TU eindhoven

  • Authors:

  • John Van Den Broek;Cor Hurkens;Gerhard Woeginger

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands;Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands;Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • PATAT'06 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Practice and theory of automated timetabling VI
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

The students of the Industrial Design department at the TU Eindhoven are allowed to design part of their curriculum by selecting courses from a huge course pool. They do this by handing in ordered preference lists with their favorite courses for the forthcoming time period. Based on this information (and on many other constraints), the department then assigns courses to students. Until recently, the assignment was computed by human schedulers who used a quite straightforward greedy approach. In 2005, however, the number of students increased substantially, and as a consequence the greedy approach no longer yielded acceptable results. This paper discusses the solution of this real-world timetabling problem. We present a complete mathematical formulation of it, and we explain all the constraints resulting from the situation in Eindhoven. We solve the problem using lexicographical optimization with four subproblems. For all four subproblems, an elegant integer linear programming model is given which easily can be put into CPLEX. Finally, we report on our computational experiments and results around the Eindhoven real-world data.