Digest No. 2001-01

Editor: Graham Kendall

Please send material/submissions/comments for the WATT Digest to gxk@cs.nott.ac.uk. WATT Digests are emailed monthly to WATT members and also appear here.

Contents

Welcome to the WATT Digest no. 2001-01.
In this issue:

1. WATT Workshop
2. EJOR Special Issue
3. PATAT Selected Papers
4. Special Session at GECCO 2001
5. Timetabling Bibliography
6. Problem Datasets
7. Timetabling Resources
8. ttp mailing list
9. Items Wanted
10. Conferences of Interest to the Timetabling Community

1. WATT Workshop

4th Workshop of the EURO Working Group on Automated Timetabling (WATT)

The 4th WATT Workshop will be held at the EURO Conference in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, on July 9-11, 2001. Details of the EURO Conference can be seen on the Web page:

http://www.fbk.eur.nl/PRJ/EURO2001/content.html

As in the past, the workshop will be organised as a special session (or sessions) at the conference. The session will consist of a number of talks dealing with various issues on automated timetabling research/work. To give a talk you should submit an abstract, not longer then 1400 characters, by March 15, 2001 following the instructions given on the Web site:

http://www.fbk.eur.nl/PRJ/EURO2001/sub.html

The deadline for submission has already been extended. Please adhere strictly to this deadline, as no other extensions will be possible.
Authors of abstracts are invited to submit a full paper to a feature issue of the European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR) on "Timetabling and Rostering". The deadline for submission of papers is 31st August 2001. The full call for papers is included below. For more details about this feature issue see

http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/ASAP/watt/events.html

Please note that although the feature issue of EJOR is being held in conjunction with the workshop it is NOT necessary to attend the workshop in order to submit a paper to the feature issue.

The abstracts should be submitted either via e-mail or by ordinary mail to:

Sanja Petrovic
Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning Research Group
School of Computer Science and Information Technology
University of Nottingham
Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road
Nottingham NG8 1BB, UK
Fax: +44 (0)115 951 4249
E-mail: sxp@cs.nott.ac.uk

Accepted abstract will be published in a Conference proceeding.

Please note that EURO may be able to subsidise the cost of attendance at the conference for Central and East European WATT members and for student members.

2. EJOR Special Issue

A feature issue of EJOR will be aimed at all aspects of timetabling and rostering research. Original, high quality papers are sought from across the range of theoretical and applied timetabling research issues.

This feature issue is being organised in conjunction with the 4th Workshop of the EURO Working Group on Automated Timetabling (WATT) being held at the 18th European Operational Research Conference (EURO XVIII) in Rotterdam, July 9-11, 2001. For more details about the workshop see

http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/ASAP/watt/events.html

Submission of papers to the issue is NOT restricted, however, to the workshop attendees and papers are sought from across the timetabling and rostering research community.

The articles submitted will be peer-reviewed, according to the usual procedure of the European Journal of Operational Research.

Topics covered by the feature issue may include, but are not restricted to the following aspects of Timetabling and Rostering:

• Applications
• Theoretical Issues
• Heuristics and Meta-heuristics
• Knowledge Based Approaches
• Distribution and Large Scale Issues
• Solution Quality and Evaluation
• The Impact of Emerging Technologies

Manuscripts can be submitted either via e-mail or by sending 4 hard-copies to the address indicated below. All submissions should include a title page containing title, contact author, author(s) names and affiliations, regular postal addresses, and e-mail addresses.

Sanja Petrovic
Guest Editor, European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR)
University of Nottingham
School of Computer Science and IT
Automated Scheduling, Planning and Optimisation Group
Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road
Nottingham, NG8 1BB, UK
Email: sxp@cs.nott.ac.uk

Deadline for submissions: August 31, 2001

Detailed instructions for authors can be found at:

http://www.elsevier.com/homepage/sae/orms/eor/menu.htm

3. PATAT Selected Papers

Selected papers from the recent PATAT conference (in Konstanz) will shortly be published by Springer-Verlag as part of their Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. The list of papers for these proceedings will shortly be available at

http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/patat/patat-index.shtml

This page also contains details of the papers from the first two PATAT conferences in Edinburgh and Toronto.

4. Special Session at GECCO 2001

At GECCO 2001 (San Francisco, California, Holiday Inn Golden Gateway Hotel, July 7-11) there are a series of "Birds of a Feather" Workshops. These will be held on Saturday 7th July.
One of these sessions (being organised by Peter Cowling and Graham Kendall) is entitled

The Next Ten Years of Scheduling Research

The details are below

This workshop will allow those attending to discuss how scheduling research can be advanced in the next ten years. There are many techniques that have been reported in the literature that have produced excellent results when applied to scheduling problems. For example the use of meta-heuristic techniques (such as tabu search and simulated annealing) and evolutionary techniques (such as genetic and memetic algorithms). One emerging research area is to develop heuristics that operate at a higher level of generality than current technology can support. This will involve advances in heuristics, meta-heuristics and an emerging technique tentatively called a hyper-heuristic. Another interesting idea is to use an "adaptive" heuristic. This uses the idea that a scheduling problem can be solved using a heuristic but, for many reasons, this heuristic can lead to solutions which, although, better than previous efforts, can be even better if the heuristic is allowed to adapt as the search progresses. Through this workshop we hope to achieve three main aims: Allow the delegates to learn about some of the latest techniques and ideas that are being applied by leading researchers in the scheduling community. Invite other researchers to present their ideas as to how the field should develop in the next ten years. We are not looking for results of their current research, rather we are looking for new, blue sky ideas that can lead the research in the near future. Promote discussion on these ideas so that the scheduling community as a whole can benefit.

Further details about these workshops can be found at

http://gal4.ge.uiuc.edu:8080/GECCO-2001/workshops/index.html

The main GECCO page is at

http://gal4.ge.uiuc.edu:8080/GECCO-2001/

In addition a page for the scheduling workshop is being maintained at

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gxk/gecco2001/

5. Timetabling Bibliography

The WATT pages contain a comprehensive bibliography up to 1995 (see http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/watt/resources/bibliography.html).

We are currently working on updating this resource to include ALL timetabling papers from the 1995 to date. We would like you to tell us about ANY timetabling papers you know from 1995. However please note that we are aware of all the papers published as part of the PATAT series of conferences.

If you know of any timetabling papers please EMAIL them to Limin Han (lxh@cs.nott.ac.uk) at The University of Nottingham, UK.

6. Problem Datasets

The WATT pages contain a small number of problem datasets

(see http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/ASAP/watt/resources.html)

We would like to extend these datasets and we invite you to submit any datasets you have available so they can be listed on the WATT pages. We are particularly interested in datasets relating to course timetabling, examination timetabling, school timetabling and personnel timetabling.

If you have any solution results we would also like to put these on WATT so that future researchers have something to compare against. Also, if you know of the references where the datasets are used, that would also be useful.

Please EMAIL any information to Limin Han (lxh@cs.nott.ac.uk) at The University of Nottingham, UK

7. Timetabling Resources

The WATT page at

http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/watt//resources/resources.html

contains a list of useful resources to timetabling researchers. Please take a few minutes to look at it and see if there is anything missing. If you would like a link added to the page, please EMAIL J Dario Landa Silva (jds@cs.nott.ac.uk) at The University of Nottingham

8. ttp mailing list

The mailing list ttp@cs.nott.ac.uk has recently been discontinued. It was felt that watt@cs.nott.ac.uk was serving the same purpose and there was only a need for one.

9. Items Wanted

In order to make WATT Digest as interesting as possible, I would like to include as much as I can in each issue. Please let me have anything that you think may be of interest to the timetabling community. Just to give you some ideas, how about sending me

Titles and abstracts of good, recent papers you have come across
Upcoming conferences
Reviews of papers
Details about software packages
Recently published thesis
Timetabling problems that you are working on (and maybe could use some help with)
Questions that you would like to ask the community

10. Conferences of Interest to the Timetabling Community

Conferences of interest to timetablers can be found at the Conference Diary web site for the Journal of Scheduling. The URL is

http://www.interscience.wiley.com/jpages/1094-6136/sites.html