A survey of automated timetabling

The timetabling problem consists in scheduling a sequence of lectures between teachers and students in a prefixed period of time (typically a week), satisfying a set of constraints of various types. A large number of variants of the timetabling problem have been proposed in the literature, which differ from each other based on the type of institution involved (university or school) and the type of constraints. This problem, that has been traditionally considered in the operational research field, has recently been tackled with techniques belonging also to Artificial Intelligence (e.g., genetic algorithms, tabu search, and constraint satisfaction). In this paper, we survey the various formulations of the problem, and the techniques and algorithms used for its solution.