Course Timetabling at a Tunisian University: a Case Study

This paper deals with the Course Timetabling Problem at an institution in a Tunisian University. We introduce a heuristic procedure to construct a feasible timetable for all lectures and tutorials taken by different groups of each sub-section of any section. We describe the timetabling problem using a list of all specific hard and soft constraints. We formulate the problem as a set of linear constraints using two sets of binary variables corresponding to lectures and tutorials, respectively. This heuristic is illustrated with real data for a sub-section of the Faculty of Economics and Management Sciences of Sfax in Tunisia, and the resulting timetables are compared with those generated manually. The results of another full section have confirmed the good quality of the proposed heuristic when compared with the hand made solution.