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A Two-Phase Constraint Programming Model for Examination Timetabling at University College Cork

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Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 12333))

Abstract

Examination timetabling is a widely studied NP-hard problem. An additional challenge to the complexity of the problem are many real-world requirements that can often prevent the relaxation of some constraints. We report on a project focused on automating the examination timetabling process of University College Cork (UCC) to enhance the examination schedules so that they are fairer to student, as well as being less resource intensive to generate from an administrative point of view. We work with a formulation developed in collaboration with the institution and real data that it provided to us. We propose a two-phase constraint programming approach to solving UCC ’s examination timetabling problem. The first phase considers the timing of examinations while the second phase considers their allocation to rooms. Both phases are modelled using bin-packing constraints and, in particular, an interesting variant in which items can be split across multiple bins. This variant is known as bin packing with fragmentable items. We investigate the tightly linked constraints and difficulties in decomposing the centralised model. We provide empirical results using different search strategies, and compare the quality of our solution with the existing UCC schedule. Constraint programming allows us to easily modify the model to express additional constraints or remove the pre-existing ones. Our approach generates significantly better timetables for the university, as measured using a variety of real-world quality metrics, than those prepared by their timetabling experts, and in a reasonable timeframe.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    UCC dataset can be found in: http://github.com/begumgenc/ucc-et.

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Acknowledgement

Special thanks to Margo Hill, the Examinations Administrator, and Siobhán Cusack, Head of Student Records and Examinations Office at University College Cork. We thank Léa Blaise from the LocalSolver team for their efforts, comments, and suggestions for improving our model, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. This publication has emanated from research conducted with the financial support of Science Foundation Ireland under Grants 16/RC/3918 and 12/RC/2289-P2 which are co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Confirm Centre for Smart Manufacturing, School of Computer Science and Information Technology, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

    Begum Genc & Barry O’Sullivan

  2. Insight Centre for Data Analytics, School of Computer Science and Information Technology, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

    Barry O’Sullivan

Authors
  1. Begum Genc
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  2. Barry O’Sullivan
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Correspondence to Begum Genc .

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  1. Insight Centre for Data Analytics, School for Computer Science and Information Technology, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

    Helmut Simonis

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Genc, B., O’Sullivan, B. (2020). A Two-Phase Constraint Programming Model for Examination Timetabling at University College Cork. In: Simonis, H. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming. CP 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12333. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58475-7_42

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58475-7_42

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