Timetabling the examinations of an entire university

Abstract

Scheduling examinations in a large University is an increasingly complex problem, due to its size, the growing flexibility of students curricula and the interest in including a wide set of objectives and constraints. Building a course timetable is a difficult and lengthy task which universities devote a large amount of human and material resources to every year. In this paper we present a new algorithm for this problem and its application to a University in Greece. The optimization process is based on a set of heuristic algorithms.

Keywords and phrases:

• Timetabling
• heuristics
• operation research
• educational policy