mORetime (Mathematical Optimization Reaching Enhanced TIMEtables) is a research group dedicated to apply advanced Operations Research methods to optimize hard real-world timetables, primarily in the education sector.
For schools, the timetable can be viewed as the production plan for the school. Creating a good production plan is a very complex task which may both take a lot of time to achieve, and bad timetables may furthermore lead to bad resource utilization, employee dissatisfaction and student complaints. Hence there is definitely a need for decision-support for the timetable planners, but in many schools the tools do not exist.
In the mORetime research group we apply advanced Operations Research methods to create algorithms that are both valuable decision support for the timetable planners, but also grounded on solid Operations Research science. The main tool is Mixed Integer Programming (MIP). Despite impressive improvements in the MIP solver technology most timetable MIP models cannot be solved directly, even using state-of-art solvers, like CPLEX or Gurobi. Instead we apply decomposition methods and various MIP heuristics to get both good performance bounds and good actual solutions.
The partners MaCom and Management Science at DTU Management each bring valuable experience into the project: MaCom has more than a decade of experience in (cloud) software for the education sector in Denmark. Their Lectio software is a kind of ERP software which is used by more than 200 schools, and more than 90 % of the Danish High-Schools apply it.
Management Science (MS) at DTU Management is one of the leading Operations Research groups in Scandinavia. The MS group has a long experience in collaboration with companies in order to apply Operations Research methods to hard decision-support problems.
The collaboration between MaCom and MS started in 2007 and has produced a number of Master's theses, Bachelor theses, four finished PhD theses and a number of articles.