A new model for curriculum-based university course timetabling

The Curriculum Based university Course Timetabling (CCT) problem consists in determining the best scheduling of university course lessons in a given time interval, assigning the lessons of each course to classrooms and time periods, so that a series of constraints is satisfied. These constraints are divided into two categories: hard constraints, necessary so that the programming can actually be implemented, and soft constraints, which involve qualitative measures. This paper deals with the study of the CCT problem. We formulate a new and complete model that satisfies both the planning constraints and those on the compactness of the curricula, the distribution of the lessons (in the examined time frame), the teachers’ preferences, the minimum number of working days, maximum capacity and stability of the classrooms (which aims to minimize the daily movements of students among classrooms) so that the resulting timetable is of high quality. The formulated model, with appropriate adaptations, has been applied to the real case study of the first year of the Mathematics Degree Course of the University of Catania, Italy.