Description of the problem

The timetabling problem proposed has been designd by Ben Paechter for the Metaheuristics Network. It is a reduction of a typical university course timetabling problem. It consists of a set of events to be scheduled in 45 timeslots (5 days of 9 hours each), a set of rooms in which events can take place, a set of students who attend the events, and a set of features satisfied by rooms and required by events. Each student attends a number of events and each room has a size. A feasible timetable is one in which all events have been assigned a timeslot and a room so that the following hard constraints are satisfied:

• no student attends more than one event at the same time;
• the room is big enough for all the attending students and satisfies all the features required by the event;
• only one event is in each room at any timeslot.

In addition, a candidate timetable is penalised equally for each occurrence of the following soft constraint violations:

• a student has a class in the last slot of the day;
• a student has more than two classes consecutively;
• a student has a single class on a day.