PATAT Community Support

The International Series of Conferences on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling (PATAT) has been supporting a range of competitions and challenges as listed below, investing back in the timetabling community for the benefit of the field.

• Integrated Healthcare Timetabling Competition (IHTC 2024) (2024-ongoing)
  IHTC 2024 intends to stimulate research focusing on the challenges of integrated optimization problems. The considered optimization problem integrates three critical problems in healthcare: surgical case planning, patient admission scheduling and nurse-to-room assignment.

• The Fifth International Timetabling Competition (ITC 2021) (2020-2021)
  ITC 2021 is the fifth International Timetabling Competition that aims to motivate further research on automated sports timetabling and to learn from these efforts. The problem instances consist of constructing a time-constrained double round-robin tournament with 16 to 20 teams while respecting some hard constraints and minimizing the penalties from violated soft constraints.

• The Fourth International Timetabling Competition (ITC 2019) (2018-2020)
  ITC 2019 is the fourth International Timetabling Competition, devoted to University Course Timetabling. It is aimed to motivate further research on complex university course timetabling problems coming from practice and to create rich real-world data sets with diverse characteristics collected from institutions on six continents. It introduces the combination of student sectioning together with time and room assignment of events in courses.

• The Second International Nurse Rostering Competition (2014-2016)
  This competition introduced the concept of stages and required the competitors to solve a sequence of cases referring to consecutive weeks of the planning horizon. The problem is defined by a scenario, a set of weeks and an initial history description. Problems have to be solved covering the full scenario of 4 or 8 consecutive weeks, in stages of 1 week at the time.

• Cross-domain Heuristic Search Challenge (CHeSC 2011)
  This competition aimed at bringing together practitioners from operational research, computer science and artificial intelligence who are interested in developing more generally applicable methodologies. The challenge is to design a high level search strategy that controls a set of problem specific low level heuristics. The set of low level heuristics will be different for each problem domain, but the high level strategy which controls the heuristics must remain the same.

• The Third International Timetabling Competition (ITC2011)
  ITC2011 was the third International Timetabling Competition, devoted to High School Timetabling. Consisting of three separate rounds, the Competition focused on the important area of High School Timetable. This is a complex common problem faced by thousands of educational institutions worldwide.

• The First International Nurse Rostering Competition (2010)
  Building good rosters for nurses in hospitals has been receiving ample attention in recent years and is recognised as a difficult combinatorial optimisation problem with practical relevance. In hospitals much effort is spent producing solutions which are workable and of a high quality. An important aim of this competition was to generate new approaches to the associated problems by attracting users from all areas of research.

• The Second International Timetabling Competition (ITC2007)
  Building on the success of the first, this competition aimed to further develop interest in the general area of educational timetabling while providing researchers with models of the problems faced which incorporate an increased number of real world constraints. The competition was divided into three tracks: Examination Timetabling, Post Enrolment based Course Timetabling, Curriculum based Course Timetabling.

• The First International Timetabling Competition (2002-2003)
  The timetabling problem used in the competition is a reduction of a typical university course timetabling problem.