Recent developments in practical examination timetabling -- Computer-aided school and university timetabling: The new wave -- Scheduling, timetabling and rostering — A special relationship? -- Examination timetabling in British Universities: A survey -- Employee timetabling, constraint networks and knowledge-based rules: A mixed approach -- Automated time table generation using multiple context reasonig with truth maintenance -- Investigations of a constraint logic programming approach to university timetabling -- Building University timetables using constraint logic programming -- Complete University modular timetabling using constraint logic programming -- Using Oz for college timetabling -- A smart genetic algorithm for university timetabling -- A genetic algorithm solving a weekly course-timetabling problem -- GA-based examination scheduling experience at Middle East Technical University -- Peckish initialisation strategies for evolutionary timetabling -- A memetic algorithm for university exam timetabling -- Extensions to a memetic timetabling system -- Automatic timetabling in practice -- The complexity of timetable construction problems -- Some combinatorial models for course scheduling -- The phase-transition niche for evolutionary algorithms in timetabling -- Three methods used to solve an examination timetable problem -- General cooling schedules for a simulated annealing based timetabling system -- How to decompose constrained course scheduling problems into easier assignment type subproblems -- Other timetabling papers.

This book contains a selection of strictly refereed papers presented at the First International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling, held in Edinburgh, UK, August/September 1995. This is the first book entirely devoted to automated timetabling and meets the clear need for a wide-ranging survey of the state of the art in the area. The book contains four survey papers by leading experts together with 19 revised full papers presenting new results; the papers are organized in topical sections on reasoning about constraints, genetic algorithms, complexity issues, and tabu search and simulated annealing.