A two-stage heuristic for the university course timetabling problem

This paper presents a two-stage solution method for the curriculum-based university course timetabling problem. First, an initial solution is created using a recursive search algorithm, then its quality is improved with a local search heuristic. This method utilizes a tabu list of forbidden transformations, as well as a destructive step at the end of each iteration. The algorithm is tested on datasets of the 2007 International Timetabling Competition.