Design, Engineering, and Experimental Analysis of a Simulated Annealing Approach to the Post-Enrolment Course Timetabling Problem

TL;DR

This paper presents a well-engineered Simulated Annealing metaheuristic for the post-enrolment course timetabling problem, achieving new best results across multiple benchmark instances through comprehensive experimental analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, thoroughly tuned Simulated Annealing approach tailored for PE-CTT, demonstrating superior performance on existing benchmark datasets.

Findings

Achieves new best known results on several instances

Performs competitively across all tested variants

Provides state-of-the-art solutions for PE-CTT

Abstract

The post-enrolment course timetabling (PE-CTT) is one of the most studied timetabling problems, for which many instances and results are available. In this work we design a metaheuristic approach based on Simulated Annealing to solve the PE-CTT. We consider all the different variants of the problem that have been proposed in the literature and we perform a comprehensive experimental analysis on all the public instances available. The outcome is that our solver, properly engineered and tuned, performs very well on all cases, providing the new best known results on many instances and state-of-the-art values for the others.