Proceedings of the 2013 Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference

A. Krishnamurthy and W.K.V. Chan, eds.

An Integer Programming Model for The Academic Timetabling

Problem

Rolando José Acosta-Amado

Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana seccional Bucaramanga
Km. 7 Autopista Piedecuesta, Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia

Marcela Villa-Marulanda
Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana seccional Bucaramanga
Km. 7 Autopista Piedecuesta, Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia

Abstract
Every term, universities must decide the timetable its academic programs will operate with during the following
semester. The academic timetable (AT) results from defining schedules, teachers and classrooms for the different
subjects during an academic term. Usually, this task involves the work of highly qualified employees during many
hours a week for several months every year. The available technologies for dealing with this problem often have the
capabilities to prevent conflicts in classrooms and schedules for teachers and students, yet they do not generate a
feasible schedule from scratch; it is often generated manually using heuristic procedures. Generating a feasible
timetable for academic institutions is a process that has to be carried out on a case by case basis. Every institution
has its own operating characteristics making a successful solution approach in one place a not so useful tool for
another institution. An integer programming (IP) model to generate the AT for the Faculty of Industrial Engineering
of the Bolivarian Pontifical University at Bucaramanga-Colombia (FIIoUPBBGA) is proposed. The model helps to
determine an AT reasonably adjusted to reality enforcing its main features while outperforming the currently used
methods.

Keywords
Mathematical modeling, integer programming, academic timetabling, university course timetabling

1. Introduction
There is a remarkable variety of administrative activities in educational institutions. In universities, perhaps one of
the most time consuming is to determine the schedules for its faculty members and students in every department,
every semester. This activity is known in the literature as the academic timetabling problem (ATP) and it usually
involves the participation of highly qualified personnel during a significant portion of their weekly schedule, which
makes the process very expensive. There are two basic issues of great concern with the solution methodology: it is
generally based on common sense and it is implemented manually. In a significant number of institutions, the former
is precluding the final result from being the best possible scenario, sometimes even creating ill-defined timetables,
and the latter is making the process to require vast amounts of time, which makes the traditional approach an
ineffective way to tackle the problem. The ATP of the FIIoUPBBGA consists in determining the schedules, the
teachers and the classrooms for the different subjects during an academic term. The solution methodology in use is a
computationally demanding common-sense-based algorithm implemented by hand using a spreadsheet and every
semester it requires about 3 months to solve the ATP for the next semester. As a result, the worker must devote a
significant portion of her weekly schedule to timetabling activities, making the process an expensive activity for the
institution. Moreover the final result is far from perfect in a significant number of occasions.
In the literature, a significant number of methodologies to solve this type of problem is available, including:
heuristic procedures, integer programming models, constrained programming models and so forth. Nonetheless, all
these approaches respond to the specific needs of the institutions in which they have been developed and they cannot
be used to solve the problem in another institution due to the significant differences in the operational policies
among the institutions [1]. Also, an important number of classifications for the problem have been proposed
 Acosta-Amado, Villa-Marulanda
considering different types of aspects. In general, the ATP could be classified as follows: University Course
Timetabling Problem (UCTP), High School Course Timetabling Problem (HSTP), University Examination
Timetabling Problem (UETP) and High School Examination Timetabling Problem (HSTP). The interested reader
can find a complete and broad classification in [2]. As the ATP has attracted much attention during the last 50 years
[3], before year 2000, a significant number of extensive reviews on the ATP were published [4-9].
Despite the diverse number of mathematical models to solve the problem, for the particular case of the
FIIoUPBBGA they provide an incomplete solution because these methods do not always guarantee the fulfillment of
its specific conditions. There are institutional regulations that have to be considered and a few of these studies have
focused on some of them individually. These drawbacks preclude the implementation of any of these models to
solve the specific version of the problem at UPBBGA. The currently used methodology to solve the problem usually
generates timetables of questionable quality and sometimes it is necessary to reexamine the final result to correct
mistakes so the process turns out to be even more expensive. A valid mathematical model for the ATP at UPBBGA
that could be solved in a non-prohibitive computational time would facilitate a more efficient operation of these
activities and would also enhance the academic administration of the institution.
The aim of this paper is to propose a novel IP model for the ATP of the FIIoUPBBGA. The intention of the model is
to facilitate the solution process of the problem. The decisions were represented by binary variables and a selected
set of important operational aspects of the system were modeled with the constraints. The model was tested in a set
of random instances in order to better understand its computational performance and to provide an idea of the
possibilities for implementation in a practical setting. The results suggest that a mathematical approach could be
used to solve the problem for the entire school of engineering of UPBBGA. The paper is organized as follows: in the
next section, the problem definition is presented. Section three presents a discussion on the relevant work available
in the literature. Section four introduces the proposed model and provides a discussion about its size. The performed
computational experiments and an analysis of the obtained results are presented in section five. Directions for future
research are proposed in section six and then the references are listed in the last section of the paper.

2. The ATP at UPBBGA

In solving the ATP of the FIIoUPBBGA, the university official (UO) in charge has to consider the subjects to be
offered, the number of sessions of each subject, the available faculty to deliver every session of every subject, the
classrooms in which every subject can be delivered and the time slots during the week when every session of every
subject can be delivered. Creating a new AT from scratch is not only a tedious task but also very inefficient since it
requires a significant amount of time, which is why the solution methodology in use seeks the minimization of the
changes in the new AT with respect to the previous one. This technique is known as rolling and its activities start
about 3 months before the registration of the next academic term. Therefore, these activities are representing an
important portion of the weekly duties of the UO responsible for them.
The complexity of the ATP for the solution methodology in use could be attributed to three main aspects: physical
constraints, legitimate exceptions in the availability of certain faculty members to deliver classes and the
institutional regulations that have to be fulfilled. The availability of classrooms, instructors and the need to avoid
overlapping in the generated timetable for every instructor and every classroom are 3 physical requirements that
must be modeled. In most of the literature, these conditions are known as hard constraints. In addition to this, some
faculty members are part of collegiate teams that take care of academic and disciplinary decisions, consequently
they cannot be scheduled to deliver classes during the time slots when the corresponding committee is scheduled to
meet. This condition reduces the availability of those faculty members during the week to deliver classes; therefore
the number of options to build the AT also decreases contributing to the complexity of the problem; what is more, it
is desirable that an instructor do not deliver more than 4 hours of class in a single teaching block. All these
conditions shall be fulfilled by the AT developed for every term but in not a few cases some of those conditions are
not completely fulfilled creating frustration among the students and the faculty members.

3. Related Work
One way to design an academic timetable is by using mathematical programming techniques and there have been an
important amount of research efforts in this direction. Perhaps the first attempt to solve the problem using a
mathematical model was proposed in [10] and after that a significant number of models have been proposed to solve
the problem, yet they do not consider all the operational aspects of interest for UPBBGA. In this section, a selected
set of papers where IP models for the UCTP were proposed after year 2000 are commented in order to provide an
idea about some trends of the research in mathematical programming to solve this problem during the last 12 years.
 Acosta-Amado, Villa-Marulanda
Dimopoulou & Miliotis, (2001) designed and implemented a PC based system to aid in the construction of a
combined university-course examination timetable. The system incorporated both IP optimization and heuristic
procedures [11]. In another paper, Dimopoulou & Miliotis, (2004) examined the design and implementation of a
computer network based system to aid the construction of a university course timetable. The system used an IP
model to assign courses to timeslots and rooms to construct each department’s timetable [12]. Daskalaki, et al.,
(2004) proposed a 0-1 IP formulation to solve the university timetabling problem in a general context that considers
a significant number of operational rules present in most institutions. An additional set of features present in
Engineering Schools of Greek universities was also considered. The model was evaluated with three problems of
different size [13]. In another study, Daskalaki & Birbas, (2005) proposed a two-stage relaxation procedure that
solves efficiently the IP formulation of a university timetabling problem introduced in [13]. During the first stage,
the heaviest computational constraints are relaxed to obtain a starting point and during the second stage, these
constraints are included to find an optimal solution [14]. MirHassani (2006) reported on the convenience of
implementing IP approaches to solve the UCTP at Shahrood University of Technology and developed a novel 0-1 IP
model to solve the UCTP. The proposed model outperformed the method that was already in use [15]. Al-Yakoob &
Sherali (2006) proposed a mathematical model to assign faculty members to classes at Kuwait University and
assumed that time slots for classes were initially given. An integer programming model was used to solve the
problem. The IP model sought the minimization of individual and collective dissatisfaction of faculty members in a
fair fashion. The dissatisfaction was measured by a function of the assignment of faculty members to time slots and
classes. Gender based modeling considerations were included as well as constraints related to efficient facility
utilization [16]. Bakir & Aksop, (2008) proposed a 0-1 IP model for the university timetabling problem to minimize
the dissatisfaction of students and lecturers considering a specific set of conditions such as credit requirements,
consecutiveness, classroom consistency, theory-practice precedence and others [17]. In another study, Saldaña et al.,
(2007) proposed 2 IP models for the UCTP and studied 2 solution strategies for each model. The minimization of
undesirable timeslots was sought in the objective function while balancing the daily duties for each group of
students. The solution strategies considered direct assignment to classrooms models and direct assignment to types
of classroom models. Two timetabling sub problems were defined: a class-teacher timetabling problem and a
classroom assignment problem [18]. More recently, Broek, Hurkens, & Woeginger, (2009) introduced two
mathematical programming formulation for a variant of the problem: a network flow approach and an integer
programming model; which was proven to be NP hard. In problem formulation 1 the goal was to assign as many
courses to students as possible while meeting the requirements established by the department. In this model, the
workload of all courses was assumed to be equal. In model 2, this assumption was relaxed and different workloads
for the courses were modeled. This condition resulted in the second model to be NP hard [19].

4. The Model
The purpose of this section of the paper is twofold: first, to introduce the current version of the proposed
mathematical model for the ATP of the FIIoUPBBGA, which is still being developed; and second to provide a
discussion on the size of the model and its relation with the parameters of the system. The model is presented by
first defining the scalars and sets and on the basis of that, the decision variables, the objective function and the
constraints are provided. The size of the model is discussed according to the number of variables and the number of
constraints, both expressed in terms of the scalars of the system. Finally, some remarks about the relation of the
parameters and the size of the model are presented.

Scalars:
Number of subjects (sbj) involved in the timetable
: Number of sessions (ssn) of subject that must be delivered
Number of available instructors (ins) to deliver the subjects
Number of available classrooms (cr) to deliver the different courses
Number of available timeslots (tslt) during the week to deliver classes
Number of weekly meetings required by subject
Sets
{ }: sbj’s to deliver
{ }: Available inst
{ }: Sessions of the sbj
{ }: Available rms
{ }: Days of the week
 Acosta-Amado, Villa-Marulanda
{ }: tslt
Decision variables:
{

{
Objective function:
∑∑∑ ∑∑ ( ) (1)
Constraints
∑ (2)
(3)
∑ ∑ (4)
∑ (5)
∑ (6)
∑ (7)
∑ (8)
∑ (9)
∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ (10)
(11)
∏ (12)
(13)
∏ (14)
∏ (15)
∏ (16)
∑ ( ) ∏ [ ( )] (17)
( ) ∏ [ ( )] (18)

Equation one represents the objective function. This model seeks the minimization of timetabling classes in extreme
time slots. There are three extreme time slots: 6.00am-8.00am, 12.00m-2.00pm and 6.00pm-8.00pm. Equation two
guarantees that at least one instructor will be assigned to deliver subject . Equation three enforces that in order for
instructor to deliver session of subject , it first has to be assigned to that instructor. Equation four guarantees
that at least one subject will be assigned to instructor . Equation five enforces that only one instructor will be
assigned to each session of every subject. The assignment of one classroom for every meeting of each session of
every subject delivered by every instructor is enforced by the set of constraints represented by equation six. The set
of constraints represented by equation seven guarantees the assignment of a timeslot for every session of subject
delivered by instructor on a classroom by classroom basis. The constraints represented by equation eight prevent a
classroom from being assigned more than once in every timeslot of every day of the timetable. Equation nine
guarantees that an instructor will not have to deliver more than three different subjects. The set of constraints
represented by equation ten enforces that only up to two consecutive timeslots of classes will be scheduled for every
instructor.
The size of the proposed model depends on the number of subjects to deliver, the number of sessions of each subject
to deliver, the number of available instructors and the number of available classrooms to define the timetable.
Although the number of days per week and the number of timeslots also determine the size of the model, those are
two constant parameters that do not change from one semester to the next one. In contrast, the other parameters can
vary significantly every academic term and for this reason they were considered critical parameters to determine the
size of the model. For presentation purposes in this section of the paper, let be the number of constraints of the set
represented by the equation.
The total number of constraints is given by equation 17 and the total number of decision variables of the model (TV)
is given by equation 18. Table 1 provides the number of each group of decision variables expressed as a function of
the number of courses, instructors, classrooms, days of the week, timeslots and sessions of each course, as it
corresponds for every case. The number of constraints and the number of variables are strongly dependent on the
 Acosta-Amado, Villa-Marulanda
number of sessions of every subject. An increase in this parameter of the model will create a significant increase in
the size of the problem making the timetabling activities a more challenging problem from the point of view of the
model proposed in this paper.
Table 1: Number of Decision Variables
Decision Number of
Variables Variables

∏
∏
∏

5. Computational Experiments and Analysis of Results

A set of 39 random instances was used to test the computational performance of the model based on the required
computational time to find a solution within a 5% optimality gap. For identification purposes, an instance notation
was introduced on the basis of the parameters that define the size of a given scenario. The parameters that affect the
size of the instance of the problem are: number of subjects ( ), number of instructors ( ), number of sessions of
every course ( ) and number of classrooms ( ). Every instance used in the set of computational experiments was
represented as / / / . The results of the computational experiments are displayed in Table 2.
Every instructor was assumed to be able to deliver up to 40% of the courses and 80% of the classrooms could be
used to deliver a given course. Only 40% of the courses could not be timetabled in the afternoon and the remaining
60% of the courses were timetabled in the afternoon. The ranges for the number of courses, instructors, sessions and
classrooms in the tested random instances of the model were: [15,35], [5,30], [1,5], [1,20] respectively. The
attention was centered in the solution results, the objective function, the computational time and the number of
iterations. The observed solution results were: no solution found (No Solution Found), problem is infeasible
(Infeasible), feasible solution found (Feasible Solution), near optimal solution found with a p% optimality gap (p%
Opt Gap) and optimal solution found (Optimal). Recall that the objective function of the model represents the
number of extreme timeslots used in the generated timetable. In every instance but the 39 th (35/30/5/20), an upper
bound of 3600 seconds was used for the computational time. In the case of instance 35/30/5/20, the algorithm was
allowed to run until an optimal solution was found in order to have a rough idea of how much time would be
required by GAMS to solve this model in such a big scenario to optimality. The number of iterations was also
reported in order to portray the impact of adding sessions to an instance topology in the computational effort. The
number of different sessions of every subject strongly affects the computational effort required to find an optimal
timetable.
In 30 out of 39 instances, an optimal solution was found in less than an hour of computational time. In contrast, for
the instances 25/10/5/5 and 35/25/5/15 no solution could be found in up to one hour of computational time. In the
former case, it might have been related with the small number of instructors to deliver all the sessions of the courses
which may have turned the search space tighter demanding more computational time; and in the latter, a scarcity of
classrooms could have been the reason for a tighter search space. In 33 out of 39 instances, the required
computational time was less than 1000 seconds to find any of the aforementioned results; some of the biggest
instances were in this group.

Table 2: Results of the Computational Experiments

Topology Objective Computational
Instance Solution Results
( / / / ) Function Time
1 15/5/1/5 Optimal 0 0.378
2 15/5/2/5 Optimal 0 0.398
3 15/5/3/5 Optimal 12 0.823
4 15/5/4/5 Optimal 61 4.041
5 15/5/5/5 Infeasible N/A 0.820
6 20/10/1/5 Optimal 0 0.545
7 20/10/2/5 Optimal 0 2.422
8 20/10/3/5 Optimal 13 5.050
9 20/10/4/5 Optimal 45 44.412
10 20/10/5/5 Infeasible N/A 3.475
 Acosta-Amado, Villa-Marulanda
Topology Objective Computational
Instance Solution Results
( / / / ) Function Time
11 20/24/4/15 Optimal 70 4.008
12 20/7/1/5 Optimal 0 0.333
13 20/7/2/5 Optimal 0 0.541
14 20/7/3/5 Optimal 16 179.591
15 20/7/4/5 2.7% Opt Gap 63 3600.81
16 25/10/1/5 Optimal 0 0.653
17 25/10/1/6 Optimal 0 1.492
18 25/10/2/5 Optimal 3 2.696
19 25/10/2/6 Optimal 0 3.590
20 25/10/3/5 Optimal 37 12.539
21 25/10/3/6 Optimal 18 14.040
22 25/10/4/5 Infeasible N/A 3.603
23 25/10/4/6 Optimal 62 154.062
24 25/10/5/5 No Solution Found N/A 3600.4
25 25/15/1/1 Optimal 6 0.957
26 25/15/1/3 Optimal 0 0.778
27 25/15/1/5 Optimal 0 2.044
28 25/15/2/5 Optimal 7 7.062
29 25/15/3/5 Optimal 43 17.505
30 25/15/4/5 Infeasible N/A 8.076
31 25/15/5/5 Infeasible N/A 9.658
32 25/15/5/10 Optimal 20 244.249
33 25/15/5/15 Feasible Solution 32 3608.991
34 25/20/5/15 Optimal 0 225.679
35 30/20/5/15 Optimal 10 517.231
36 30/25/5/15 Optimal 0 647.611
37 35/25/5/15 No Solution Found N/A 3612.028
38 35/25/5/20 Optimal 0 1335.161
39 35/30/5/20 Optimal 0 15661.250

6. Directions for Future Research

In previous studies, a diverse number of approaches to model and solve this problem has been proposed. Daskalaki
& Birbas, (2005) for example proposed to model and solve the problem by using IP. MirHassani, (2006) proposed a
computational approach that uses an IP model to enhance the course timetabling process. Bakir & Aksop, (2008)
proposed a 0-1 IP approach to model and solve the ATP. Nonetheless, these studies did not consider simultaneously
all the features of the problem at the FIIoUPBBGA. In general, to our knowledge, no study has considered all the
operational aspects of the FIIoUPBBGA to propose a solution for the ATP.
In this paper we tested the extent to which the ATP in the particular case of FIIoUPBBGA could be solved by using
an IP model. It was found that in virtually all the instances, a feasible AT was obtained within a time span of 1 hour
and in a significant number of cases an optimal solution for the problem was found. These findings extend those of
Bakir & Aksop, (2008) to the case of the ATP of the FIIoUPBBGA, suggesting that it could be solved by an IP
model adapted to its specific needs considering a significant amount of operational characteristics of the system
while trying to minimize the dissatisfaction of lecturers. In addition to this, the computational time required by the
proposed mathematical programming approach to solve the problem might be lower than the one required by the
currently used methods to solve it. This study therefore indicates that an IP model can be used to enhance this
administrative task at the FIIoUPBBGA. Most notably, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first mathematical
programming approach to solve an ATP that includes constraints to enforce certain operational rules. The model
considered a limit of consecutive sessions delivered by instructors and a limit for the number of different subjects
delivered by an instructor when s/he can deal with more than 3, given her/his expertise. The results suggest that
more Faculties of the School of Engineering of UPBBGA could be included in the model to aid the academic
timetabling process.
 Acosta-Amado, Villa-Marulanda
However, two limitations are worth noting. First, there are still some conditions related with regulations of the
institution that were not included in this version of the model and second, the solution procedure does not consider
the model structure which is necessary to make it more efficient and capable of dealing with larger scenarios of the
problem. Future work should therefore address the former by adding more constraints and running additional
computational experiments in order to investigate how the new conditions of the model can affect the required
computational time to find an acceptable timetable. For the latter, perhaps a branch and bound algorithm
implementation will provide a near optimal solution in a non-prohibitive computational time. Regarding the
addition of new constraints, the weekly number of teaching hours with the number of different subjects to be
delivered by instructors will have to be considered. An instructor can deliver one, two or three subjects, and the
amount of assigned teaching hours per week depends on the number of different subjects, as shown in Table 3. In
order to model this new condition, new decision variables will have to be proposed and of course new sets of
constraints will also have to be added to the model. In order to implement the solution in the real system, in the next
level of this research project an application to translate the results obtained from the mathematical model to a more
user friendly application should be developed. This model will eventually be capable of generating acceptable AT’s
in a non-prohibitive computational time.

Table 3: Policy for Teaching Duties Assignment

Interval for the
Subjects
Assigned
Assigned
Teaching Hours
1 [20,24]
2 [16,20]
3 [12,16]

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