An integer mathematical model for the problem of timetabling university exams

Abstract

This research is an attempt to create optimized planning in educational units. The problem of university courses timetabling is one of the problems that is very important for educational units; establishing optimal distances to comply with students' study status as well as balancing other constraints of the timetabling problem is one of the challenges in a timetabling problem. Therefore, sometimes an educational unit may not be able to strike a good balance between all the constraints it faces and fail to achieve a proper timing table. In this paper, in order to achieve optimal exam timetabling with an integer scheduling approach, a model for exam timetabling is presented. The purpose of the proposed mathematical model is to maximize the appropriate time intervals that should be established between students' exams. In this mathematical model, according to the number of allowed exam days and the number of possible exam sessions per day, a number of positions have been considered and it is tried to assign these positions to the courses according to the courses related to the students of each entrance. The most important advantage of the proposed model is its simplicity while sufficient accuracy. Therefore, complex methods are not needed to solve this model.