Solving the Dutch High School Timetabling Problem using Linear Optimization

Abstract

High School Timetabling (HSTT) is a research field that tries to solve the problem of making good timetables for high schools. Since this HSTT problem is very hard (NP-complete), it is not possible to solve the problem to optimality for every high school within a reasonable amount of time. During my master research the HSTT problem for the Netherlands was formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP), which was implemented in Delphi. Different decompositions which use this MILP in two or three phases were constructed and compared. An example of this is to apply the MILP in the first phase only to teachers, and use the corresponding solution in the second phase to fix the days during which teachers are allowed to teach. The general Linear Programming solvers CPLEX and Gurobi were used to solve the MILP’s.