A Practical Examination Timetabling Problem at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

The examination timetabling problem represents a major administrative activity for academic institutions. An increasing number of student enrolments, a wider variety of courses and increasing number of combined degree courses contribute to the growing challenge of developing examination timetabling software to cater for the broad spectrum of constraints required by educational institutions. In this paper, we present a new real-world examination timetabling dataset at the University Kebangsaan Malaysia that will hopefully be used as a future benchmark problem. In addition, a new objective function that attempts to spread exams throughout the examination period is also introduced. This objective function that taking into account both timeslots and days assigned to each exam, is different from the often used objective function from the literature that only considers timeslot adjacency.