Joint Entry with Industry Makes
Mark in International Timetabling Competition
The task was to solve a problem in automated timetabling against
rival teams.
The test was to present the technique and model for handling the
scheduling problem efficiently amid real world constraints.
The context was International Timetabling Competition (ITC) 2007.
First held in 2002, ITC seeks to encourage researchers and industry
alike to raise the bar in state-of-the-art optimisation techniques
in the domain of automated timetabling.
Solutions presented in the winning entries are typically discussed
at the next International Conference on the Practice and Theory of
Automated Timetabling (PATAT).
PATAT, a forum for researchers, practitioners and vendors in various
aspects of computer-aided timetable generation, is a co-sponsor of
the competition.
To-date, ITC has attracted researchers and practitioners worldwide,
from South Africa, to Europe, US and Asia.
In Singapore, SoC Associate Professor Martin Henz teamed up with a
local software company
and its client, an international school. Together, they submitted a
competition entry based on solving the school’s timetabling
problems.
Their entry, in the curriculum-based course timetabling track of ITC
2007, made it to the top five in the category.
Prof Henz is a familiar name in complex scheduling and optimisation.
Together with his graduate student, he has set up FriarTuck a
provider of optimised workforce management solutions, which counts
among its clients NASA, for its
Mars
Rover project in 2004.
