Educational Timetabling: Problems, Benchmarks, and State-of-the-Art Results

TL;DR

This paper surveys educational timetabling research, focusing on standard problem formulations, benchmark datasets, and the current state-of-the-art solutions, including their performance metrics and techniques.

Contribution

It identifies six key standard formulations and reviews their features, benchmarks, and the latest results, providing a comprehensive overview of the field.

Findings

Six standard formulations identified and discussed.

Main state-of-the-art results on benchmarks summarized.

Analysis of solution quality, techniques, and performance metrics.

Abstract

We propose a survey of the research contributions on the field of Educational Timetabling with a specific focus on "standard" formulations and the corresponding benchmark instances. We identify six of such formulations and we discuss their features, pointing out their relevance and usability. Other available formulations and datasets are also reviewed and briefly discussed. Subsequently, we report the main state-of-the-art results on the selected benchmarks, in terms of solution quality (upper and lower bounds), search techniques, running times, statistical distributions, and other side settings.