Abstract:

The XHSTT was proposed as a standard format to express a wide rangeof School Timetabling problems. Although the format is powerful to represent dif-ferent timetabling features, its application to University Course Timetabling (UCT)problems was not formally studied. The goal of this work is to present encodingsfrom Curriculum-Based Course Timetabling (CB-CTT) and Post-Enrolment CourseTimetabling (PE-CTT) to XHSTT and to evaluate how a state-of-art XHSTT solverperforms on these problems. Computational experiments performed suggested that thisapproach is suitable for dealing with UCT: XHSTT solver would be ranked as fourth inCB-CTT track of the Second International Timetabling Competition (ITC2007) andit achieved feasible solutions for most PE-CTT instances within one hour. Althoughthe results do not outperform the best known approaches for these problems, XHSTTsolvers were designed to handle a wide range of features and constraints beyond the ones present in these models, making it able to fit the specific requirements of several universities.