Examination Scheduling with Days-off Constraints

Abstract

With an increase in the number of students and the number of courses offered by universities, examination scheduling based on the available facilities becomes much more complicated. At present, examinations must be appropriately scheduled not only based on the offered courses, but also with respect to the rooms’ capacities, available time-slots, days-off rules and other soft and hard constraints. From the Mathematical Programming point of view, timetabling and scheduling problems are somewhat related to Assignment problems, but have additional constraints that make them computationally challenging. Timetabling problems are NP-hard problems for which there is unlikely to be an economically viable method for finding the optimal solution. In our studies, we use Python interfaced with CPLEX as optimization software to find approximately optimal results for large problems in reasonable time.