Educational Timetabling: Problems, Benchmarks, and State-of-the-Art Results

Educational Timetabling, in essence, consists in assigning teacher/student meetings to days, timeslots, and classrooms. Despite this apparent simplicity, experience teaches us that every single institution has its own rules, conventions, and fixations, thus making each specific problem almost unique. As a consequence, uncountably many different problem formulations have been proposed in the literature on Educational Timetabling, depending on the type of institution (high-school, university, or other), the type of meetings (lectures, exams,...), and the different settings, constraints, and objectives. Many papers in the literature tackle a specific problem using a selected search method. The authors normally claim the success of the application, though rarely dispelling the doubt over the readers that the method used was more the authors' "favorite" rather than the most suitable for the problem under consideration.