The 2020 silver anniversary edition of PATAT was originally intended to be held by KU Leuven in Bruges (Belgium), but had to be postponed until 2022 in light of the pandemic. The conference will now instead be held in the equally beautiful city of Leuven (Belgium), the university's home town, and will run from Tuesday 30th August until Friday 2nd September 2022. The venue will be the Irish College, which promises to offer the perfect setting for researchers and practitioners to reflect, present and discuss on the substantial progress made by the timetabling academic community over the last twenty-seven years as well as to anticipate where we might be headed throughout the coming decades. To complement this historical reflection and anticipation of the future, a range of exciting plenary talks will be given by experts in established areas of timetabling as well as newly emerging ones. We therefore wish to extend a warm invitation to anyone with an interest in timetabling or related problems to participate by submitting a paper by March 23rd 2022.

Some topics of interest for the conference include, but are certainly not limited to, the following: timetabling problems (e.g., educational timetabling, timetabling in transport, employee rostering, sports timetabling, timetabling in healthcare), timetabling algorithms (e.g., mathematical programming, heuristic search, metaheuristics - Evolutionary Computation, Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search, Ant Colony Methods, hyper-heuristics, machine learning, matheuristics, constraint-based methods, algorithm portfolios, parallel/distributed computing, multi-objective/multi-criteria approaches), foundational/theoretical studies (e.g. complexity issues), timetabling tools and applications, and any optimization issues related to timetabling. 

A special track is planned, dedicated to the International Timetabling Competitions on University Course Timetabling (ITC 2019) and Sports Timetabling (ITC 2021) 

We are pleased to announce that the invited speakers who were confirmed in principle for the 2020 edition have agreed, travel restrictions permitting, to deliver plenary talks at the 2022 edition:

• Celso C. Ribeiro, Computer Science, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil
• Sigrid Knust, Institut für Informatik, Universität Osnabrück, Germany
• Andrea Schaerf, Polytechnic Department of Engineering and Architecture, University of Udine, Italy
• Deepak Ajwani, School of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Ireland
• Peter Nightingale, Department of Computer Science, University of York, UK

We look forward to welcoming you to Leuven where you will be free to sample some of the finest versions of the very best things life has to offer: Belgian chocolate, beer and fries!

Submission Guidelines

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. PATAT 2022 invites authors to submit their work in one of three categories:

• Full papers describing significant, original and unpublished work.
• Extended abstracts of up to 3000 words describing preliminary results, incomplete papers or practitioners’ experiences, for people who wish to give a talk but do not want to submit a full paper.
• System demonstrations, abstracts of up to 1000 words describing the major properties and contribution of implemented and/or commercial timetabling systems.

Submission Format

All papers must be written in English and submitted as a PDF file. The authors should use the templates provided:

The length of the paper should fulfill the requirements stipulated for each category. The conference volume uses theLecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) format. Authors should use the LNCS templates provided at the Springer website.  

• The LateX2e version (preferred) (template)
• The Microsoft Word (> 2007) version (template)

All papers must be submitted as a PDF file. No other format will be accepted!

All submissions will be peer reviewed by at least three members of the programme committee. Accepted papers will be invited for an oral presentation at the event and included in the PATAT 2022 proceedings after they have been presented.

Journal Special Issue

Authors of all three categories will be invited to submit extended versions of their original work as full papers for consideration to be published in a Special Issue of an Academic Journal.

Important dates

• Paper Submission Deadline ** Strict! **              23 March 2022
• Notification of Acceptance                                 6 May 2022
• Early Registration Closes                                    ** To be confirmed **
• Conference                                                        30 August - 2 September 2022
• Social Day ** Bruges! **                                     3 September 2022

Details can be found on the conference website:http://www.patatconference.org/patat2022/