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A matheuristic for customized multi-level multi-criteria university timetabling

Course timetables are the organizational foundation of a university’s educational program. While students and lecturers perceive timetable quality individually according to their preferences, there are also collective criteria derived normatively such as balanced workloads or idle time avoidance. A...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Dunke, Fabian, Nickel, Stefan
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer US 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10080184/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37361056
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10479-023-05325-2
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author Dunke, Fabian
Nickel, Stefan
author_facet Dunke, Fabian
Nickel, Stefan
author_sort Dunke, Fabian
collection PubMed
description Course timetables are the organizational foundation of a university’s educational program. While students and lecturers perceive timetable quality individually according to their preferences, there are also collective criteria derived normatively such as balanced workloads or idle time avoidance. A recent challenge and opportunity in curriculum-based timetabling consists of customizing timetables with respect to individual student preferences and with respect to integrating online courses as part of modern course programs or in reaction to flexibility requirements as posed in pandemic situations. Curricula consisting of (large) lectures and (small) tutorials further open the possibility for optimizing not only the lecture and tutorial plan for all students but also the assignments of individual students to tutorial slots. In this paper, we develop a multi-level planning process for university timetabling: On the tactical level, a lecture and tutorial plan is determined for a set of study programs; on the operational level, individual timetables are generated for each student interlacing the lecture plan through a selection of tutorials from the tutorial plan favoring individual preferences. We utilize this mathematical-programming-based planning process as part of a matheuristic which implements a genetic algorithm in order to improve lecture plans, tutorial plans, and individual timetables so as to find an overall university program with well-balanced timetable performance criteria. Since the evaluation of the fitness function amounts to invoking the entire planning process, we additionally provide a proxy in the form of an artificial neural network metamodel. Computational results exhibit the procedure’s capability of generating high quality schedules.
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spelling pubmed-100801842023-04-07 A matheuristic for customized multi-level multi-criteria university timetabling Dunke, Fabian Nickel, Stefan Ann Oper Res Original Research Course timetables are the organizational foundation of a university’s educational program. While students and lecturers perceive timetable quality individually according to their preferences, there are also collective criteria derived normatively such as balanced workloads or idle time avoidance. A recent challenge and opportunity in curriculum-based timetabling consists of customizing timetables with respect to individual student preferences and with respect to integrating online courses as part of modern course programs or in reaction to flexibility requirements as posed in pandemic situations. Curricula consisting of (large) lectures and (small) tutorials further open the possibility for optimizing not only the lecture and tutorial plan for all students but also the assignments of individual students to tutorial slots. In this paper, we develop a multi-level planning process for university timetabling: On the tactical level, a lecture and tutorial plan is determined for a set of study programs; on the operational level, individual timetables are generated for each student interlacing the lecture plan through a selection of tutorials from the tutorial plan favoring individual preferences. We utilize this mathematical-programming-based planning process as part of a matheuristic which implements a genetic algorithm in order to improve lecture plans, tutorial plans, and individual timetables so as to find an overall university program with well-balanced timetable performance criteria. Since the evaluation of the fitness function amounts to invoking the entire planning process, we additionally provide a proxy in the form of an artificial neural network metamodel. Computational results exhibit the procedure’s capability of generating high quality schedules. Springer US 2023-04-07 /pmc/articles/PMC10080184/ /pubmed/37361056 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10479-023-05325-2 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Original Research
Dunke, Fabian
Nickel, Stefan
A matheuristic for customized multi-level multi-criteria university timetabling
title A matheuristic for customized multi-level multi-criteria university timetabling
title_full A matheuristic for customized multi-level multi-criteria university timetabling
title_fullStr A matheuristic for customized multi-level multi-criteria university timetabling
title_full_unstemmed A matheuristic for customized multi-level multi-criteria university timetabling
title_short A matheuristic for customized multi-level multi-criteria university timetabling
title_sort matheuristic for customized multi-level multi-criteria university timetabling
topic Original Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10080184/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37361056
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10479-023-05325-2
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