Glossary · approach
Course Timetabling
The problem of assigning courses to teachers, classes, rooms, and times in schools or universities without conflicts.
TimetablingCourse Timetabling Problem
The Course Timetabling Problem is the problem of producing the weekly schedule in an educational institution. Hard constraints (no teacher in two places, no class in two courses, no room over capacity, curriculum-required weekly hours) are balanced against soft preferences (teacher availability, pedagogical flow, max consecutive periods). Mathematically formulated by Gotlieb in the 1960s, today it is the most common test problem of constraint programming (CP) research. Sub-variants include school course timetabling, university course timetabling, and exam timetabling. The PATAT conference releases international benchmark sets every two years.
Örnek
For a high school: 30 classes × 50 teachers × 5 labs × 200 weekly courses + 10 pedagogical preferences (e.g. no math right after PE), producing a conflict-free weekly schedule is the course timetabling problem.