Recent developments in practical course timetabling

Course timetabling is a multi-dimensional NP-Complete problem that has generated hundreds of papers and thousands of students have attempted to solve it for their own school. In this paper, we describe the major components of the course timetabling problem. We discuss some of the primary types of algorithms that have been applied to these problems. We provide a series of tables listing papers in refereed journals that have either implemented a solution or tested their algorithm on real data. We made no attempt to provide a qualitative comparison. We restricted our presentation to a description of the types of technique used and the size of problem solved We have not included commercial software vendors