In 1979, a review (Schmidt and Ströhlein, The Computer Journal 23, 307) already listed about 300 papers on timetable construction. In the meantime, the literature has enormously grown. See Schaerf (Artificial Intelligence Review 13, 87 [1999]) for a recent survey; see also current issues of the Journal of Scheduling and the European Journal of Operational Research as well as the proceedings of the PATAT conference series.

Note however that scientific efforts are almost entirely devoted to automatization. In order to keep their programs manageable, papers legible, and results comparable, researchers tend to concentrate on oversimplified model problems; for instance, in the case of the school timetabling problem, it is typically assumed that all students of a class follow exactly the same curriculum. For this reason, most of the existing literature is not immediately applicable to real-life timetabling problems.

In the following, some papers shall be listed that descend to the more mundane aspects of school timetabling:

R. J. Willemer: School timetable construction: algorithms and complexity, doctoral thesis, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven 2002, available online, specifies relevant data structures before embarking on automatization problems.

web ressources

EURO-WATT, a research network.

other free software projects

OrarioElettronico Similar intention and screen design as in our project, realized with completely different technology (PHP and mySQL).

FET - Free Evolutionary Timetabling Similar technology as in our project (C++ with Qt), but aimed at automatization, using a genetic algorithm.

addenda

If you know of other ressources that might be of interest, please send a mail.

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