The school timetabling problem (STP) consists in fixing a sequence of meetings between teachers and students in a prefixed period of time (typically a week), satisfying organizational, pedagogical and personal constraints. STP is a NP-complete problem and is usually tackled using heuristic methods. In this work we considered typical characteristics of Brazilian public schools. We presented a Tabu Search procedure associated with a Randomized Local Search to solve this problem and two mathematical formulations. The implementation of the procedure has been successfully experimented in some Brazilian public schools.
school timetabling; meta-heuristics; combinatorial optimization
