The research works in this direction focus on constraint programming algorithms and modern meta-heuristics such as local search methods, genetic algorithms and hybrid approaches.
One of important applications of this research direction is automatic timetabling, for example, timetabling in educational institutions, in hospitals and industry, etc….

A temporal database is a database that records time-varying information. It is perhaps surprising that temporal databases is a very active area within database research. There have been more than 2000 papers written about this topic over a 20-year period. Research works in this direction include temporal data models, temporal query languages, temporal indexing, temporal query processing and optimization, temporal integrity checking, temporal database implementation, temporal abstraction, temporal data mining, etc…

A time series database consists of sequences of values or events changing with time and the values are typically measured at equal time intevals. Time series databases are popular in many applications, such as studying daily fluctuations of a stock market, traces of a dynamic production process, scientific experiments, medical treatments, and so on. The research works in this direction examine several important aspects of modeling, querying, trend analysis, similarity pattern search and forecasting in time series data.