Investigation of a Real World Distributed Optimisation Environment
Investigation and development of methodologies and algorithms to provide for the production of high quality Institutional Course timetables.
Investigation of techniques used for resource planning.
This will allow the production of timetables which are both fair equitable to every student within the confines of the available resources.
Research Challenges
Investigation of techniques to deal with the distributed, information poor environment in which course timetables are produced.
Standardisation of datasets, constraints and modeling languages influenced by real world scenarios.
Investigation of the role in user interaction in the design of decision support system for course timetabling.
Investigation of the need for the reformulation and modeling of the problem. It should be need that this represents a far greater challenge within the context of course timetabling than it does for examination timetabling.
Identification and adaptation of high level policies and practices that are employed by administrators within institution to construct of initial solutions.
Experimentation related to heuristic approaches to subdivision of events.
Investigation of the effect of pre and post enrolment production of the timetable on the approaches taken to optimisation e.g. penalty used.
Undertake an investigation into the delivery of more sophisticated models which capture the complexity and multi-objective nature of timetable evaluation in the real world.
Investigation of the important linkage between space usage and flexibility within the academic timetable.
Investigation of approaches involving decomposition and ‘macro event’ timetabling.