Our study case involved real scheduling data covering three semesters
at Syracuse University. The size and type of the three-semester data
is shown in Table #table01#495>. Nine types of rooms were used and
they are: auditoriums, classrooms, computer clusters, conference
rooms, seminar rooms, studios, laboratories, theaters, and
un-specifies types. Staff and teaching assistants are considered part
of the set of professors. In addition, third semester (summer) data
was much smaller, however, there were additional space/time
constraints and fewer number of available rooms. Our data was quite
large in comparison to data used by other researchers, for example,
[#18##1#, #27##1#, #28##1#]. Peterson and colleagues high school data [#26##1#, #27##1#, #28##1#] consists of approximately 1000 students, 20 different possible
majors, and an overall periodic school schedule (over weeks). In the
case of Abramson et al. [#18##1#], their data set was created randomly
and relatively small. Also they stated that problems involving more
than 300 tuples were very difficult to solve.