WATT Digests

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Digest No. 2002-02

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. 2002-02.
In this issue:

  1. WATT EMAIL Groups
  2. EJOR Special Issue
  3. New Published Thesis
  4. Problem Dataset
  5. PATAT 2002 Call for Participation
  6. GECCO Workshop - Scheduling : Bringing Together Theory and Practise
  7. GECCO Workshop - Scheduling and Logistics Workshop
  8. Timetabling Bibliography
  9. Problem Datasets
  10. Timetabling Resources
  11. Items Wanted
  12. Conferences of Interest to the Timetabling Community

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

1. WATT EMAIL Groups

To make an announcement, please send an email to this e-mail list. The e-mail will be forwarded to watt@cs.nott.ac.uk automatically. The e-mail list watt@cs.nott.ac.uk will continue to be used as a discussion group. If anybody wants to contribute, please send email only to watt@cs.nott.ac.uk. Members who do not want to be involved in discussions should send an e-mail to Limin Han (lxh@cs.nott.ac.uk). She will remove you from watt and add you to watt-announcement.

2. EJOR Special Issue

A feature issue of the European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR) on "Timetabling and Rostering" was organised in conjunction with the 4th WATT Workshop. The deadline for submission has now passed and the submitted papers are undergoing the refereeing process. Further information will be posted in this newsletter when it is ready.

3. New Published Thesis

New published thesis in workforce scheduling: A new thesis entitled "Intelligent Search Methods for Workforce Scheduling: New Ideas and Practical Applications " is available in PS from

http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/staff/musliu/publications.htm

4. Problem Dataset

Set of 200 random examples for shift scheduling problem are availiable from

http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/proj/Rota/benchmarke.htm

5. PATAT 2002 Call for Participation

The 4th International Conference for the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling (PATAT'2002) Wednesday, 21st August - Friday, 23rd August 2002 KaHo St.-Lieven, Gent, Belgium. Details about conference participation can be found at

http://project.kahosl.be/patat2002/

CALL FOR PAPERS ---- The call for papers is now closed

The themes of the conference include (but are not limited to):

  • Sports Timetabling
  • Educational Timetabling
  • Transport Timetabling
  • Employee Timetabling
  • Complexity Issues
  • Distributed Timetabling Systems
  • Experiences
  • Implementations
  • Commercial Packages
  • Interactive vs Batch Timetabling
  • Timetable Updating
  • Relationship with Other Scheduling Problems
  • Timetabling Research Areas, including:
    1. Constraint Based Methods
    2. Evolutionary Computation
    3. Artificial Intelligence
    4. Graph Colouring
    5. Expert Systems
    6. Heuristic Search
    7. Knowledge Based Systems
    8. Operational Research
    9. Simulated Annealing
    10. Local Search
    11. Mathematical Programming
    12. Soft Computing
    13. Tabu Search

6. GECCO Workshop

Scheduling : Bringing Together Theory and Practice

A GECCO (Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2002, New York, July 9-13 2002) Workshop entitled "Scheduling : Bringing Together Theory and Practice" is inviting participation. A plenary talk will be given by Mike Pinedo.

The outline of the workshop is as follows

The workshop provides a logical follow-up to our successful workshop "The Next Ten Years of Scheduling Research" at the GECCO 2001 conference, which attracted sponsorship from Wiley and had 40 participants.

A good deal of the "theoretical" scheduling research which is currently being undertaken could provide significant benefits if it were applied in industry and commerce. One of the principal barriers to the take up of this research is the lack of a dialogue between problem "owners" in industry and commerce and problem "solvers" in academia. A major dificulties is the clash between the "publish or perish" mindset of academics and commercial confidentiality considerations. However, in recent times there has been a move in the academic literature towards greater acceptance and understanding of the problems of publishing research where commercial confidentiality is an issue. Substantial mutual benefits are possible, with those in industry and commerce able to realise profitability imporvements, and those in academia benefitting from access to "real" problems. This workshop will bring together researchers from industry, academics already working with industry, and academics who would like to increase their industrial contacts to discuss mechnanisms for bridging the gap between scheduling theory and practice. We will also look forward towards problems which will be of increasing importance to industry and commerce in the longer term, and which should be one of the drivers for future theoretical research.

Further details can be found at

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gxk/gecco/2002/scheduling.html

7. GECCO Workshop

Scheduling and Logistics Workshop

A GECCO (Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2002, New York, July 9-13 2002) Workshop entitled "Scheduling and Logistics" is inviting participation. A plenary talk will be given by Peter Ross and further details can be seen at

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gxk/gecco/2002/logistics.html

8. 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

9. Problem Datasets

The WATT pages contain a small number of problem datasets

(see http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/watt/resources/downloads.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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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