Schedule conflict resolution in a small faculty

The issue addressed in this paper deals with finding a course schedule that meets the requirements of the faculty in three areas: (1) it must offer the required courses to meet the respective program mandates; (2) it must offer courses in a way that allows the programs to be accessible to students at various stages of meeting their degree requirements; and (3) it must satisfy the faculty about teaching the courses at the assigned times. The faculty-wide schedule is obtained by solving an assignment where the endogenous variables are indexed with respect to times and courses. A utility function reflecting the desirability of faulty members to teach at various times of the week is used to obtain alternative solutions that meet other ´hard´ constraints. Scheduling conflict resolution in the faculty is currently done in an ad hoc manner. A preliminary application of the scheduling method to a single department suggests that this is a useful approach.