A Heuristic for Scheduling Examination to Room Based on Exam Duration Length

Abstract

Solving the real world university timetabling problem is crucial and important in order to satisfy not only the given constraints but also to maximise the needs of the students. Most of the previous researches emphasized on producing a good quality solution of the clash free timetable by focusing on spreading exams over timeslots. Apart from that, less attention had been given on minimising the disturbance of the exam. We have divided the process of developing the timetable into two major phases, Exam-Timeslot assignment phase and Exam-Room assignment phase. In this paper, we focused on the second phase by assuming that all exams have already been assigned to timeslots. We introduced a new soft constraint, i.e. exam duration length that needed to be considered when assigning examinations to rooms. This constraint was identified through the short survey on the satisfaction of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) students towards the UKM examination timetabling. Based on the survey, 73.5% of the 83 respondents preferred the exams that are scheduled in the same room, should complete at the same time. Therefore, we proposed a new formulation and heuristic that attempt to minimise this disturbance when students sit for the exam, i.e. our heuristic attempts to assign exams that have the same exam duration length to the same room.