TY - JOUR A1 - Banbara, Mutsunori A1 - Inoue, Katsumi A1 - Kaufmann, Benjamin A1 - Okimoto, Tenda A1 - Schaub, Torsten H. A1 - Soh, Takehide A1 - Tamura, Naoyuki A1 - Wanko, Philipp T1 - teaspoon BT - solving the curriculum-based course timetabling problems with answer set programming JF - Annals of operation research N2 - Answer Set Programming (ASP) is an approach to declarative problem solving, combining a rich yet simple modeling language with high performance solving capacities. We here develop an ASP-based approach to curriculum-based course timetabling (CB-CTT), one of the most widely studied course timetabling problems. The resulting teaspoon system reads a CB-CTT instance of a standard input format and converts it into a set of ASP facts. In turn, these facts are combined with a first-order encoding for CB-CTT solving, which can subsequently be solved by any off-the-shelf ASP systems. We establish the competitiveness of our approach by empirically contrasting it to the best known bounds obtained so far via dedicated implementations. Furthermore, we extend the teaspoon system to multi-objective course timetabling and consider minimal perturbation problems. KW - Educational timetabling KW - Course timetabling KW - Answer set programming KW - Multi-objective optimization KW - Minimal perturbation problems Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-018-2757-7 SN - 0254-5330 SN - 1572-9338 VL - 275 IS - 1 SP - 3 EP - 37 PB - Springer CY - Dordrecht ER - TY - GEN A1 - Banbara, Mutsunori A1 - Soh, Takehide A1 - Tamura, Naoyuki A1 - Inoue, Katsumi A1 - Schaub, Torsten H. T1 - Answer set programming as a modeling language for course timetabling T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - The course timetabling problem can be generally defined as the task of assigning a number of lectures to a limited set of timeslots and rooms, subject to a given set of hard and soft constraints. The modeling language for course timetabling is required to be expressive enough to specify a wide variety of soft constraints and objective functions. Furthermore, the resulting encoding is required to be extensible for capturing new constraints and for switching them between hard and soft, and to be flexible enough to deal with different formulations. In this paper, we propose to make effective use of ASP as a modeling language for course timetabling. We show that our ASP-based approach can naturally satisfy the above requirements, through an ASP encoding of the curriculum-based course timetabling problem proposed in the third track of the second international timetabling competition (ITC-2007). Our encoding is compact and human-readable, since each constraint is individually expressed by either one or two rules. Each hard constraint is expressed by using integrity constraints and aggregates of ASP. Each soft constraint S is expressed by rules in which the head is the form of penalty (S, V, C), and a violation V and its penalty cost C are detected and calculated respectively in the body. We carried out experiments on four different benchmark sets with five different formulations. We succeeded either in improving the bounds or producing the same bounds for many combinations of problem instances and formulations, compared with the previous best known bounds. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe - 594 KW - answer set programming KW - educational timetabling KW - course timetabling Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-415469 SN - 1866-8372 IS - 594 SP - 783 EP - 798 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Banbara, Mutsunori A1 - Soh, Takehide A1 - Tamura, Naoyuki A1 - Inoue, Katsumi A1 - Schaub, Torsten H. T1 - Answer set programming as a modeling language for course timetabling JF - Theory and practice of logic programming N2 - The course timetabling problem can be generally defined as the task of assigning a number of lectures to a limited set of timeslots and rooms, subject to a given set of hard and soft constraints. The modeling language for course timetabling is required to be expressive enough to specify a wide variety of soft constraints and objective functions. Furthermore, the resulting encoding is required to be extensible for capturing new constraints and for switching them between hard and soft, and to be flexible enough to deal with different formulations. In this paper, we propose to make effective use of ASP as a modeling language for course timetabling. We show that our ASP-based approach can naturally satisfy the above requirements, through an ASP encoding of the curriculum-based course timetabling problem proposed in the third track of the second international timetabling competition (ITC-2007). Our encoding is compact and human-readable, since each constraint is individually expressed by either one or two rules. Each hard constraint is expressed by using integrity constraints and aggregates of ASP. Each soft constraint S is expressed by rules in which the head is the form of penalty (S, V, C), and a violation V and its penalty cost C are detected and calculated respectively in the body. We carried out experiments on four different benchmark sets with five different formulations. We succeeded either in improving the bounds or producing the same bounds for many combinations of problem instances and formulations, compared with the previous best known bounds. KW - answer set programming KW - educational timetabling KW - course timetabling Y1 - 2013 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1471068413000495 SN - 1471-0684 VL - 13 IS - 2 SP - 783 EP - 798 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER -