Design, engineering, and experimental analysis of a simulated annealing approach to the post-enrolment course timetabling problem

The post-enrolment course timetabling (PE-CTT) is one of the most studied timetabling problems, for which many instances and results are available. In this work we design a metaheuristic approach based on simulated annealing to solve the PE-CTT. We consider all the different variants of the problem that have been proposed in the literature and we perform a comprehensive experimental analysis on all the available public instances. The outcome is that our solver, properly engineered and tuned, performs very well on all cases, providing the new best known results on many instances and state-of-the-art values for the others.