Intelligent Examination Timetabling Software

Abstract

Previously, human schedulers at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) were human decision makers (BPA officer) who applied assignment procedure based on their experience with a little guidance from computer software to generate the exam timetable. They would take into account spreading exams evenly, and fairly, throughout the timetable but the size and complexity of the problem makes this unrealistic to be solved manually. Therefore, we have proposed a new extended graph colouring heuristics and developed a prototype to solve UKM examination timetabling problem, which has been practically used starting from Semester II, 2006/2007. The proposed work aims to produce an intelligent commercial scheduler that capable of producing a high quality examination timetable. We will utilise a new objective function that was proposed in our previous work to evaluate the quality of the timetable. The objective function considers both timeslots and days in assigning exams to timeslots, where a higher priority is given to minimise students having consecutive exams on the same day. The objective also tries to spread exams throughout the examination period. The outcome of the research could directly enhance services given by Bahagian Pengurusan Akademik (BPA), where BPA can produce a high quality exam timetable in a shorter time frame. Furthermore, this work might lead to reduce examination stress among students and might help them to obtain a better result by allowing ample revision time.