Automated University Timetabling with Robustness

时间表和日程安排问题在私营部门和公共部门都广泛存在。(In)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的满意度产生重大影响。除了给定时间表/时间表的有效性外，部署的解决方案在应对需求/资源可用性变化时的健壮性/脆弱性也往往是一个重要的问题。一个典型的时间表问题是大学课程时间表。搜索域有数百个房间、数百个模块、数百名工作人员和数千名学生，要找到满足需要满足的广泛限制的最佳解决方案，还远远不够。取而代之的是，教职员工团队通常使用启发式搜索算法来制定最终的时间表。随着大学规模的扩大，学生在系内外可用模块的选择也增加了，因此制定时间表的任务也增加了复杂性。这个项目将开发和应用大学时间表领域的时间表，例如，使用超启发式算法，将约束条件转换为多目标优化问题的标准，并制定标准来有效评估解决方案的健壮性。

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.