Solving a Course Timetabling Problem with an Integer Programming Approach

Nowadays, the course timetabling problem in educational institutions, especially in universities, is concerned as a special and important matter. In past, course timetabling used traditional methods, and this leads to some inadequacies in timetabling of the courses. Therefore, many studies have been carried out in order to formulate and optimize the timetabling problem with respect to the existed constraints and priorities. There are two kinds of constraints, namely hard (e.g., capacity of the rooms, time sections defined by university) and soft (e.g., the lecturers’ time priorities minimizing the time gap between two courses of the same students in each day). So, in these kinds of problems, which aim at finding a course timetable with the lowest deviation from the priorities of students and lecturers (i.e., soft constraints) and satisfying the whole major constraints of the problem (i.e., hard constraints), classify as NP-hard problems. Therefore, finding the optimized solution in the lowest time for these problems is remarkable. In this paper, this problem is modeled and then solved by an integer programming approach.