As well as nearly always belonging to the class of NP-complete problems, university timetabling problems can be further complicated by the often idiosyncratic requirements imposed by the particular institution being considered. It is perhaps due to this characteristic that in the past decade-or-so, metaheuristics have become increasingly popular in the field of automated timetabling. In this paper we carry out an overview of such applications, paying particular attention to the various methods that have been proposed for dealing and differentiating between constraints of varying importance. Our review allows us to classify these algorithms into three general classes, and we make some instructive comments on each of these.
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