Student centred school timetabling

This paper reports on the formulation of a secondary school timetabling problem as a non-linear goal program, where students freely choose their courses of study from a complete list of subjects rather than the usual restricted sets of subjects. The problem as formulated is far too large to solve by traditional optimisation methods, so it is broken down into several stages for solution by heuristics to give good timetabling schedules which are at least as good as those built by manual methods. Timetable construction using a desktop computer is reduced from weeks to hours, giving schools the opportunity to construct timetables closer to the time when student choices and teaching staff are more settled.