Track: Undergraduate Research Presentation

Abstract

King Abdulaziz University contains separate campuses, a male and female campus, due to cultural reasons. With the recent focus on accreditation programs such as ABET, there has been an increased pressure to standardize everything between the two campuses, including final exams, despite differences in departments. The current final exam scheduling process at KAU requires administrative employees to create a schedule experimentally without well-defined guidelines which leaves underutilized time slots and process variation each semester. The goal of this study is to develop a program that follows a systematic process that utilizes time slots efficiently to generate a single unified schedule that suits both campuses.

To approach the problem, the existing process is analyzed, and improvements are identified. The improved process is divided into two phases: permanent and variable scheduling. A constraint-based approach is used where the problem is modeled as a set of resources such as room capacity and time slots, with a defined set of constraints. Linear programming is used to guarantee an optimal timetable. Finally, a computer application using the improved process is developed. It is anticipated that if the system is adopted, final exam scheduling will be much more efficient in terms of time and human effort.