Tabu search: An efficient metaheuristic for university organization problems

In the last 10 years we have been working on large scale academic organization problems. For the university we have worked on exam scheduling, student assignment to sections, course scheduling and a process of student self-registration. The developed algorithms are quite complex and are based on different techniques, but for all of them the Tabu Search procedures have been the essential tool for obtaining good solutions. In this paper we describe the common elements and the special characteristics of these algorithms.