Quality recovering of university timetables

At universities, the timetable plays a large role in the daily life of students and staff, showing when and where lectures are given. But whenever a schedule is executed in a dynamic environment, disruptions will occur. It is then desirable to find a new timetable similar to the old one, so only a few people will be affected.

This leads to a minimum perturbation problem, where the goal is to find a feasible timetable by changing as few assignments as possible. This solution will, however, often lead to timetables of low quality as it can have many undesired features that will cause much inconvenience for effected parties.