Submission

Call for Papers

The biennial conference on Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling (PATAT) has been a forum for over 20 years welcoming both researchers and practitioners of timetabling to exchange ideas. PATAT 2024 will be the thirteenth edition in this international series.

Aim and Scope

Whether it is sporting events, educational institutions,transportation or employee management the construction of efficient timetables which provide the maximum in way of flexibility for all constituent parts is as important as it is challenging. An increasingly important aspect within organisations is an automated approach which optimises all aspects of resource usage. In doing so a number of quantitative and qualitative challenges must be dealt with from both a technical and practical perspective.

An important aim of the conference is to align the needs of practitioners and the objectives of researchers. This is achieved through the presentation and application of leading edge research techniques. Practitioners and Researchers alike are encouraged to present their work and experiences with the overall goal of developing efficient and practical solutions. With this goal in mind, at PATAT 2024, researchers and practitioners will be brought together through a number of key presentations and workshops.

Topics of interest and themes of the conference include, but not limited to:

  • Educational Timetabling
  • Timetabling in Transport
  • Employee Rostering - Sports Timetabling
  • Timetabling in Healthcare
  • Mathematical Programming
  • Constraint-Based Methods
  • Knowledge Based Systems
  • Heuristic Search
  • Metaheuristics (e.g., Evolutionary Computation, Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search, Ant Colony Methods)
  • Systems to Build Systems (e.g., Hyper-heuristics, Algorithm Portfolios)
  • Algorithm Configuration
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Trustworthiness, Fairness and Ethical Issues in Timetabling
  • Graph Colouring
  • Resource Capacity Planning
  • Parallel/Distributed Computing
  • Hybrid Methods (e.g., Memetic Computing, Matheuristics)
  • Machine Learning (e.g., Data Mining, Classifier Systems, Neural Networks, Reinforcement Learning, Deep Learning, GFlowNets))
  • Expert Systems
  • Multi-objective Approaches
  • Multi-criteria Decision Making
  • Preference Collection and Elicitation in Timetabling
  • Foundational Studies (e.g., Complexity Issues)
  • Timetabling Tools and Technologies (e.g., Web Applications, Interactive   and Batch Systems, Standard Data Formats, Ontologies, Experiences, Libraries)

Publication

Authors are invited to submit their work in one of three categories:

  1. Full papers: to describe significant, original and unpublished work,
    (max 15 pages excluding Reference List and Appendix).
  2. Abstracts: People who wish to give a talk (e.g. practitioners,
    researchers with preliminary or incomplete papers) but do not want to
    submit a full paper can submit abstracts of up to 1000 words/4 pages.
  3. Demonstration abstracts: to showcase innovations and contributions of
    timetabling systems set in production by industrial researchers and practitioners
    (up to 1000 words/4 pages).

All submissions will be peer reviewed by the members of the programme committee. Accepted contributions will be invited for an oral presentation at the event and included in the PATAT 2024 proceedings after the event.

Submission Format

The length of the paper should fulfill the requirements given for each category. The conference volume uses the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) format. All papers must be submitted as a PDF file and authors should use the LNCS templates provided at the Springer website as appropriate.

Submission System

Authors of all types of submitted papers are kindly requested to prepare a paper in English and submit it through our online submission system by the deadline.