The Timetabling Data Set

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.