Constructing a feasible solution, where the focus is on 'hard' constraints only, is an important part of solving timetabling problems. For the University Course Timetabling Problem, we propose a heuristic algorithm to schedule events to timeslots based on cliques, each representing a set of events that could be scheduled in the same timeslot, which the algorithm constructs. Our algorithm has been tested on a set of well-known instances, and the experimental results show that our algorithm is efficient and can compete with other effective algorithms.

The course timetabling problem is concerned with the scheduling of a number of courses into some limited resources,such as rooms and timeslots,subject to a set of constraints. The biggest difficulty of the timetabling problem is that we have to schedule all the courses to some limited resource,subject to many subjective and objective constraints. These constraints can be classified into hard and soft constraints. Any feasible timetable has to satisfy all hard constraints. On the other hand,soft constraints are not compulsory but should be satisfied as many as possible. This paper designs a new algorithm based on the proposed One-Way search strategy for constructing feasible solution for timetabling problems. This algorithm was tested on the UCTP benchmarks and the computational results were compared with some algorithms. We finally come to conclusion that our algorithm is outstanding and can compete with other effective approaches.

This paper presents a model based on discrete no-fit polygon for the two-dimensional irregular packing problem.Burke et al. have presented an effective BLF algorithm to solve the irregular packing problem, however, their algorithm might generate invalid results for some special cases.To solve this problem, a model based on discrete no-fit polygon is proposed, and its correctness has been strictly proved.Only points and intervals are only considered by this model, which greatly decreases the geometry complexity of the original problem and makes the problem easily solved by many heuristic strategies.Computational results show that the algorithm based on discrete no-fit polygon model is very efficient.

In this paper, a new neighborhood structure is presented. The new neighborhood is obtained by performing a sequence of swaps between two timeslots, instead of only one move in the standard neighborhood structure. Based on new neighborhood, simulated annealing algorithm can solve the timetabling problem well. The computation results on two open benchmarks coming from two real-world high schools timetabling problems prove that the simulated annealing algorithm based on new neighborhood can compete with other effective approaches.