Track: E-Business and E-Commerce

Abstract

Course timetabling is a multi-dimensional assignment problem which is the assignment of courses to faculty members, and then the assignment of these courses to time slots. Class scheduling, from the perspective of a school or a department, is a difficult problem. Typically, each course must be assigned an instructor, time slot(s) during the week, and a classroom. At any given time slot, at most one course can be assigned to an instructor and a room. The requirements and preferences of the instructors, estimated enrollment of students, and characteristics of the course must also be taken into account.

The timetabling problem has become much more complex. This problem is solved based on many restrictions such as the period time, the available number of classrooms, capacity of the classrooms or number of seats in each, amount of the registered student and other restrictions from faculty members. Because of the reasons mentioned, a scheduler, a human decision-maker, consumes time to solve the problem. Furthermore, the assignment of the students to classrooms requires concerning of the suitable number of students for the classroom since it may increase cost and waste opportunity for another appropriate classroom.