Ejection chains, reference structures and alternating path methods for traveling salesman problems
Discrete Applied Mathematics - Special volume: first international colloquium on graphs and optimization (GOI), 1992
Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness
Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness
A Survey of Automated Timetabling
Artificial Intelligence Review
A New Genetic Local Search Algorithm for Graph Coloring
PPSN V Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature
A Racing Algorithm for Configuring Metaheuristics
GECCO '02 Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
CSPLIB: A Benchmark Library for Constraints
CP '99 Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming
A survey of very large-scale neighborhood search techniques
Discrete Applied Mathematics
EasyLocal++: an object-oriented framework for the flexible design of local-search algorithms
Software—Practice & Experience
Stochastic Local Search: Foundations & Applications
Stochastic Local Search: Foundations & Applications
Multicriteria Optimization
CPAIOR '07 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems
Hybrid Local Search Techniques for the Generalized Balanced Academic Curriculum Problem
HM '08 Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Hybrid Metaheuristics
Scalable Load Balancing in Nurse to Patient Assignment Problems
CPAIOR '09 Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems
Paper: Robust taboo search for the quadratic assignment problem
Parallel Computing
A quantitative approach for the design of academic curricula
Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Human interface: Part II
Measurability and reproducibility in university timetabling research: discussion and proposals
PATAT'06 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Practice and theory of automated timetabling VI
ICAISC'06 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing
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The Balanced Academic Curriculum Problem (BACP) consists in assigning courses to teaching terms satisfying prerequisites and balancing the credit course load within each term. The BACP is part of the CSPLib with three benchmark instances, but its formulation is simpler than the problem solved in practice by universities. In this article, we introduce a generalized version of the problem that takes different curricula and professor preferences into account, and we provide a set of real-life problem instances arisen at University of Udine. Since the existing formulation based on a min---max objective function does not balance effectively the credit load for the new instances, we also propose alternative objective functions. Whereas all the CSPLib instances are efficiently solved with Integer Linear Programming (ILP) state-of-the-art solvers, our new set of real-life instances turns out to be much more challenging and still intractable for ILP solvers. Therefore, we have designed, implemented, and analyzed heuristics based on local search. We have collected computational results on all the new instances with the proposed approaches and assessed the quality of solutions with respect to the lower bounds found by ILP on a relaxed and decomposed problem. Results show that a selected heuristic finds solutions of quality at 9%---60% distance from the lower bound. We make all data publicly available, in order to stimulate further research on this problem.