Complete with online files and updates, this fascinating volume has everything you need to know about the latest developments in automated timetabling. It constitutes the refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling, PATAT 2006. The 25 revised full papers are organized in topical sections that cover everything from general issues and employee timetabling, to school and examination timetabling.

This volume is the third in an ongoing series of books that deal with the state of the art in timetabling research. It contains a selection of the papers presented at the 3rd International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling (PATAT 2000) held in Constance, Germany, on August 16{18th, 2000. The conference, once again, brought together researchers, practitioners, and vendors from all over the world working on all aspects of computer-aided timetable generation. The main aim of the PATAT conference series is to serve as an international and inter-disciplinary forum for new timetabling research results and directions. The conference series particularly aims to foster mul- disciplinary timetabling research. Our eld has always attracted scientists from a number of traditional domains including computer science and operational - search and we believe that the cross-fertilisation of ideas from di erent elds and disciplines is a very important factor in the future development of timetabling research. The Constance conference certainly met these aims. As can be seen from the selection of papers in this volume, there was a wide range of interesting approaches and ideas for a variety of timetabling application areas and there were delegates from many di erent disciplines. It is clear that while considerable progress is being made in many areas of timetabling research, there are a number of important issues that researchers still have to face. In a contribution to the previous PATAT conference, George M.

Solving scheduling problems has long presented a challenge for computer scientists and operations researchers. The field continues to expand as researchers and practitioners examine ever more challenging problems and develop automated methods capable of solving them. This book provides 11 case studies in automated scheduling, submitted by leading researchers from across the world. Each case study examines a challenging real-world problem by analysing the problem in detail before investigating how the problem may be solved using state of the art techniques.The areas covered include aircraft scheduling, microprocessor instruction scheduling, sports fixture scheduling, exam scheduling, personnel scheduling and production scheduling. Problem solving methodologies covered include exact as well as (meta)heuristic approaches, such as local search techniques, linear programming, genetic algorithms and ant colony optimisation.The field of automated scheduling has the potential to impact many aspects of our lives and work; this book highlights contributions to the field by world class researchers.

Abstract: "This paper shows that timetable construction is NP- complete in a number of quite different ways that arise in practice, and discusses the prospects of overcoming these problems. A formal specification of the problem based on TTL, a timetable specification language, is given."

Complete with online files and updates, this fascinating volume has everything you need to know about the latest developments in automated timetabling. It constitutes the refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling, PATAT 2006. The 25 revised full papers are organized in topical sections that cover everything from general issues and employee timetabling, to school and examination timetabling.

This title presents a large variety of models and algorithms dedicated to the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP), which aims at scheduling at minimal duration a set of activities subject to precedence constraints and limited resource availabilities. In the first part, the standard variant of RCPSP is presented and analyzed as a combinatorial optimization problem. Constraint programming and integer linear programming formulations are given. Relaxations based on these formulations and also on related scheduling problems are presented. Exact methods and heuristics are surveyed. Computational experiments, aiming at providing an empirical insight on the difficulty of the problem, are provided. The second part of the book focuses on several other variants of the RCPSP and on their solution methods. Each variant takes account of real-life characteristics which are not considered in the standard version, such as possible interruptions of activities, production and consumption of resources, cost-based approaches and uncertainty considerations. The last part presents industrial case studies where the RCPSP plays a central part. Applications are presented in various domains such as assembly shop and rolling ingots production scheduling, project management in information technology companies and instruction scheduling for VLIW processor architectures.

Multidisciplinary Scheduling: Theory and Applications is a volume of nineteen reviewed papers that were selected from the sixty-seven papers presented during the First Multidisciplinary International Conference of Scheduling (MISTA). This is the initial volume of MISTA—the primary forum on interdisciplinary research on scheduling research. Each paper in the volume has been rigorously reviewed and carefully copyedited to ensure its readability. The MISTA volume focuses on the following leading edge topics: Fundamentals of Scheduling, Multi-Criteria Scheduling, Personnel Scheduling, Scheduling in Space, Scheduling the Internet, Machine Scheduling, Bin Packing, Educational Timetabling, Sports Scheduling, and Transport Scheduling.