Introducing UniCorT : an iterative university course timetabling tool with MaxSAT

This paper describes the UniCorT tool designed to solve uni versity co u r se t imetabling problems specifically tailored for the 2019 International Timetabling Competition (ITC 2019). The proposed approach includes pre-processing, the use of a maximum satisfiability (MaxSAT) solver and a local search procedure. UniCorT is assessed with the benchmark instances from the ITC 2019. The impact of a handful of techniques in the quality of the solution and the execution time is evaluated. We take into account different pre-processing techniques and conjunctive normal form (CNF) encodings, as well as the combination with a local search procedure. The success of our tool is attested by having been ranked among the five finalists of the ITC 2019 competition.