Applicability of Constraint Solving and Simulated Annealing to Real-World Scale University Course Timetabling Problems

Sammanfattning: The university course timetabling problem is the problem of creating a schedule for university courses under certain constraints. The decision variant of this optimisation problem is NP-complete. We have researched this problem and implemented the heuristic simulated annealing. This implementation has been compared with respect to time to the constraint solver CPSolver, based on iterative forward search. Our results show that CPSolver scales better for large problem instances. Simulated annealing as implemented by us is thus not suitable in itself for generating valid solutions to this problem on a real-world scale.