ABSTRACT

The research work presented in this thesis aims to provide 
effective methods for solving university exam timetabling
problems. The goal is to automatically produce high quality
timetables which are easy and practical to use. Several
ideas are introduced, which could increase the overall
performance of timetabling algorithms. The primary idea is
to employ parameters which are clearly understandable for
the user and which therefore make the timetabling procedure
more transparent. The second idea is to consider the expected
processing time as one such parameter, which allows the user
to increase the quality of final solutions by the efficient
management of computational resources. In addition to this,
special attention is paid to the development of multiobjective
approaches, which can help the user to manage a high variety
of constraints (which are of different nature) and 
simultaneously, generate a solution, which mostly suits 
his/her preferences. The author also introduces the idea of
a trajectory-based multiobjective approach which enables the
search process to move along defined trajectories. A number
of different strategies for the application of trajectory-
based search are proposed, which can enable the easy
expression of user preferences.

In this thesis, five new exam timetabling algorithms are
presented (2 single-objective and 3 multiobjective ones)
which (in different ways) incorporate the ideas that are
outlined above. A comprehensive series of experiments
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.
In most cases the presented approaches significantly
outperform other techniques on established benchmark
exam timetabling problems.