An application of the Threshold Accepting metaheuristic for curriculum based course timetabling

The article presents a local search approach for the solution of timetabling problems in general, with a particular implementation for competition track 3 of the International Timetabling Competition 2007 (ITC 2007). The heuristic search procedure is based on Threshold Accepting to overcome local optima. A stochastic neighborhood is proposed and implemented, randomly removing and reassigning events from the current solution. The overall concept has been incrementally obtained from a series of experiments, which we describe in each (sub)section of the paper. In result, we successfully derived a potential candidate solution approach for the finals of track 3 of the ITC 2007.