Implementation of a university course and examination timetabling system

Abstract

This paper reports the design and implementation of a PC-based computer system to aid the construction of a combined university course–examination timetable. The specific difficulties to be faced are the restricted availability of classrooms and the increased flexibility of the students’ choices of courses, which makes the problem very tight. The system uses an integer programming (IP) model that assigns courses to time slots and rooms. The model is coupled with flexible front-end device that generates constraints corresponding to assumptions specified by the user and report writers that facilitate the presentation of the resulting schedule. The quality of the schedule produced depends on the relative position of the courses assigned to the available time periods, a condition that the IP model attempts to satisfy by constructing groups of courses that are assigned to groups of time periods. Further, the objective function is used in a way that exploits the user’s experience and knowledge of the problem. The solution of the course-timetabling problem is used to construct an initial solution to the examination timetable. A heuristic algorithm is generated to further improve it till a good feasible solution is reached. The whole system is flexible and allows the easy construction and testing of alternative schedules which are pre-conditioned according to requirements specified by the user. The Athens University of Economics and Business have used the system with success.