Title: An optimisation-based system for the university course timetabling: a novel integer linear programming model

Authors: Olfa Harrabi; Jouhaina Chaouachi Siala; Mehdi Mrad

Addresses: Higher Institute of Management of Tunis, Tunis University, 41, Liberty Street, Bouchoucha – 2000 Bardo, Tunisia ' Institute of Advanced Business Studies of Carthage, Carthage University, IHEC Carthage Presidency, 2017 Tunis, Tunisia ' Department of Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, King Saud University, P.O. Box 800, Riyadh 11421, Saudi Arabia

Abstract: University course timetabling is an ongoing challenge that most of educational institutions face when scheduling courses. The problem assigns lectures to specific numbers of time slots and rooms while taking several conflicting constraints into account. Hence, effective decision making is strongly required to provide the timetabler's a useful toolkit. This article integrates a user friendly decision support system for the university course timetabling problem. The system employs a novel linear programming formulation that provides constraints for a great number of operational rules and requirements. Treated as an optimisation problem, the objective is to provide a best solution satisfying at most teachers' preferences. The case of the High Institute of Business Studies of Carthage with a huge number of courses and teachers is treated along. The computational results of our system demonstrate a significant performance over the manual process on both computation time and solution quality.

Keywords: course timetabling; teacher preference; decision support system; DSS; sum colouring problem; integer linear programming; ILP.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2024.136412

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2024 Vol.46 No.2, pp.195 - 214

Received: 21 Oct 2021
Accepted: 29 May 2022
Published online: 01 Feb 2024 *

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