University course timetabling with multi-section courses, room stability and lecturer preferences: an application in a business school

Abstract

Education timetabling models are widely applied approaches for the effective planning of university programs all over the world at different levels. The current research deals with a real-world university course timetabling problem at the faculty level with three main features handled simultaneously in a single integer programming model: multi-section courses, room stability and lecturer preferences. An approach to modeling multi-section courses is presented so that at least one section of a mandatory multi-section course can be chosen, both within the same curriculum and across consecutive curriculums. Moreover, room stability constraints, which have been only addressed in two-stage solutions in previous studies, are integrated to ensure that courses of a student group are assigned to the same classrooms as much as possible. Maximizing the satisfaction level of the lecturers by meeting the time slot requests is also taken into consideration. After the proposed model is introduced, the solution to the model is obtained without encountering out-of-memory errors by extending the Daskalaki et al. (Eur J Oper Res 153(1): 117-135, Daskalaki et al., Eur J Oper Res 153:117-135, 2004) approach for reducing the solution space for a large-scale problem. The computational experiments at a large-scale faculty with real-world data show that the proposed model solves the problems efficiently. The proposed model can be adapted to problems with similar structures and easily solved with existing optimization solvers, even for large faculties or departments.