Constraint-based timetabling a case study

In this article we concentrate on a typical scheduling problem: the computation of a timetable for a German college. Like many other scheduling problems, this problem contains a variety of complex constraints and necessitates special-purpose search strategies. Techniques from operations research and traditional constraint logic programming are not able to express these constraints and search strategies on a sufficiently high level of abstraction. We show that the higher order concurrent constraint language Oz provides this high-level expressivity, and can serve as a useful programming tool for college time-tabling.