Practices in timetabling in higher education institutions: a systematic review

Abstract

The study of differences between timetabling research presented in conferences like PATAT or published in Annals of OR and commercial timetabling software used in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) is essential for the discussion about innovation in both higher education and in commerce. In the field of planning and scheduling, a lot of developments are made and it is important to recognise that these developments are of influence on HEIs through their use of timetabling software. A main objective of the work presented here is to provide up-to-date information about timetabling in HEIs and see to what extent they adopt and implement timetabling developments. This is crucial because of budgets of institutions being strictly limited and remaining resources like rooms having to be shared more and more. Developments in HEIs have caused planning processes in higher education to deal with more limitations than ever, while at the same time the demand towards flexibility and availability is increasing. This paper gives the results of a systematic literature review in which differences and similarities in theory and practice of timetabling in higher education are described and discussed. We looked at state-of-the-art timetabling research for HEIs, at innovations in the field of timetabling and at changing requirements in Higher Education. The aim of this paper is to motivate the discussion about both the differences and similarities and bring timetabling application development closer to educational requirements. B R. A. Oude Vrielink r.a.oudevrielink@utwente.nl

A Convex LASSO Framework for Linear Timetabling

“…In the following, we are interested in analyzing the performance of the method described in (11) and (12) for solving (1) whenŷ Tx converges to zero. We will view problem (11) as an estimation problem where we need to estimate x * and the associated average slack d * c from the given "noiseless measurements" Ax * = b in (1) and "noisy measurements" g = Dx * + d * c 1 + ζ defined in (9). We will make use of the following additional assumption.…”

“…T Imetabling is the assignment of events to a finite number of time-space resources while respecting a set of feasibility and operational constraints and meeting a certain desired objective [1]. Enhancing the efficiency and optimality of automated solutions of timetabling problems is receiving considerable attention; see for example the annual timetabling competitions in [2], [3], [4], [5], [6] and the surveys in [7], [8] and [9].…”

“…These problems are known to be NP-complete and are difficult to solve for optimality [12]. Heuristics are commonly used to provide feasible solutions without any guarantee on global optimality of the solutions, see for example the recent surveys in [6] and a good summary review of heuristics in [13], [10] and [9]. Alternatively, these problems can be also solved using exact methods, including cutting plane and/or branch and bound techniques that can be terminated with a certifi-cate proving sub-optimality [14].…”

Heuristic Algorithm for Multi-Location Lecture Timetabling

“…Each timetable category consists of different requirements to fulfill that can help in setting the constraints to get a feasible solution. An overview of the timetabling problem-solving approach, such as linear programming [9], constraint-satisfaction strategy, graphcoloring [10], meta-heuristic, and local search algorithms [11], and genetic algorithms [12], [13] are investigated [7], [14].…”

A Multistage Technique for Examination Timetabling

“…Qu et al [4] give an excellent summary of the various approaches and algorithms that have been attempted to solve the exam time tabling problem. A recent article in PATAT 2016 [5] traces the chronology of developments in the area of educational time tabling from the 80s till recent date The algorithm side has seen the use of Graph Coloring, Heuristics, Meta-Heuristics, Swarm Optimization, Genetic Algorithms ,evolutionary algorithms and Tabu Search methods in search of a global solution. [1,4,5] give an exhaustive set of references on these methods.…”