Automated University Timetabling with Robustness

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Timetabling and scheduling problems occur widely in both private and public sectors. (In)effectiveschedules can have a significant effect on profits and the efficient use of resources alongwith consumer and employee satisfaction.Alongside the effectiveness of a given timetable/schedule, the robustness/fragility ofa deployed solution when coping with changes in demand/resource availability is often also animportant concern.A prototypical timetabling problem is university course timetabling. With hundreds of rooms,hundreds of modules, hundreds of staff and thousands of students, the search domain is far toovast to be exhaustively enumerated to find an optimal solution satisfying the wide range ofconstraints needing to be satisfied. Instead, heuristic search algorithms are typically employed bya team of staff to develop the final timetable to be used.As a university grows in size, and the choice of modules available to a student both within andoutside their department expands, so the complexity the timetabling task also increases. Beyondthis, developing a timetable which has flexibility to cope with staff illness, and deal with variationin projected enrolments, complicates the task further.This project will develop and apply timetabling algorithms for the university timetabling domain,using e.g. hyper-heuristics, converting the constraints to be satisfied by a solution as criteria in amany-objective optimisation problem, and developing criteria to effectively assess the robustnessof a solution.