The University course Timetabling Problem with a three-phase approach

This paper describes the University Course Timetabling Problem (UCTP) used in the International Timetabling Competition 2003 organized by the Metaheuristics Network and presents a state-of-the-art heuristic approach towards the solution of the competition instances. It is a greatly improved version of the winning competition entry. The heuristic is divided into three phases: at first, a feasible timetable is constructed, then Simulated Annealing (SA) is used to order the thus created time-slots optimally, and finally SA is used to swap individual events between time-slots to improve the solution quality.