Integer programming techniques for educational timetabling

George H.G. Fonseca, Haroldo G. Santos, Eduardo G. Carrano, Thomas Jacob Riis Stidsen

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    Abstract

    Educational timetabling problems require the assignment of times and resources to events, while sets of required and desirable constraints must be considered. The XHSTT format was adopted in this work because it models the main features of educational timetabling and it is the most used format in recent studies in the field. This work presents new cuts and reformulations for the existing integer programming model for XHSTT. The proposed cuts improved hugely the linear relaxation of the formulation, leading to an average gap reduction of 32%. Applied to XHSTT-2014 instance set, the alternative formulation provided four new best known lower bounds and, used in a matheuristic framework, improved eleven best known solutions. The computational experiments also show that the resulting integer programming models from the proposed formulation are more effectively solved for most of the instances.
    Original languageEnglish
    JournalEuropean Journal of Operational Research
    Volume262
    Issue number1
    Pages (from-to)28-39
    ISSN0377-2217
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2017

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