Citation:
Abstract:
The XHSTT was proposed as a standard format to express a wide range of School Timetabling problems. Although the format is powerful to represent different timetabling features, its application to University Course Timetabling (UCT) problems was not formally studied. The goal of this work is to present encodings from Curriculum-Based Course Timetabling (CB-CTT) and Post-Enrolment Course Timetabling (PE-CTT) to XHSTT and to evaluate how a state-of-art XHSTT solver performs on these problems. Computational experiments performed suggested that this approach is suitable for dealing with UCT: XHSTT solver would be ranked as fourth in CB-CTT track of the Second International Timetabling Competition (ITC2007) and it achieved feasible solutions for most PE-CTT instances within one hour. Although the results do not outperform the best known approaches for these problems, XHSTT solvers 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.