We propose a set of formulations for the Curriculum-Based Course Timetabling problem, with the aim of "capturing" many real-world formulations, and thus encouraging researchers to "reduce" their specific problems to one of them, gaining the opportunity to compare and assess their results. This work is accompanied by a web application that maintains all the necessary infrastructures for benchmarking: validators, data formats, instances, reference scores, lower bounds, solutions, and visualizers. All instances proposed here are based on real data from various universities and they represent a variety of possible situations.

In this work, we consider the shift design problem and we define a novel, complex formulation arising from practical cases. In addition, we propose a new search method based on a fast Simulated Annealing, that, differently from previous approaches, solves the overall problem as a single-stage procedure. The core of the method is a composite neighborhood that includes at the same time changes in the staffing of shifts, the shape of shifts, and the position of breaks. Finally, we present a statistically-principled experimental analysis on a set of instances obtained from real cases. Both instances and results are available on the web for future comparisons.