Minimal perturbation problem in course timetabling

  • Authors:
  • Tomáš Müller;Hana Rudová;Roman Barták

  • Affiliations:
  • Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic;Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic;Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

  • Venue:
  • PATAT'04 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Many real-life problems are dynamic, with changes in the problem definition occurring after a solution to the initial formulation has been reached. A minimal perturbation problem incorporates these changes, along with the initial solution, as a new problem whose solution must be as close as possible to the initial solution. A new iterative forward search algorithm is proposed to solve minimal perturbation problems. Significant improvements to the solution quality are achieved by including new conflict-based statistics in this algorithm. The proposed methods were applied to find a new solution to an existing large scale class timetabling problem at Purdue University, incorporating the initial solution and additional input changes.