Automated University Timetabling with Robustness

时间表和日程安排问题在私营和公共部门都广泛存在。有效的时间表可以对利润和资源的有效利用以及消费者和员工满意度产生重大影响。除了给定时间表/进度表的有效性之外，在应对需求/资源可用性变化时，已部署解决方案的健壮性/脆弱性通常也是一个重要的关注点。一个典型的排课问题是大学课程排课。由于有数百个房间，数百个模块，数百名员工和数千名学生，搜索范围太大，无法详尽地列举以找到满足需要满足的广泛约束的最佳解决方案。相反，启发式搜索算法通常由工作人员团队使用，以制定要使用的最终时间表。随着大学规模的扩大，学生在院系内外可选择的模块也越来越多，因此排课任务的复杂性也随之增加。除此之外，制定一个灵活的时间表，以应对员工的疾病，并处理预计入学人数的变化，这使任务进一步复杂化。该项目将开发和应用大学时间表领域的时间表算法，例如使用超启发式，将解决方案满足的约束转换为多目标优化问题的标准，并开发有效评估解决方案鲁棒性的标准。

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.