Solving a Practical Examination Timetabling Problem: A Case Study

This paper presents a Greedy-Least Saturation Degree (G-LSD) heuristic (which is an adaptation of the least saturation degree heuristic) to solve a real-world examination timetabling problem at the University Kebangsaan, Malaysia. We utilise a new objective function that was proposed in our previous work to evaluate the quality of the timetable. The objective function considers both timeslots and days in assigning exams to timeslots, where higher priority is given to minimise students having consecutive exams on the same day. The objective also tries to spread exams throughout the examination period. This heuristic has the potential to be used for the benchmark examination datasets (e.g. the Carter datasets) as well as other real world problems. Computational results are presented.