A decision support system for the university timetabling problem with instructor preferences

Abstract

This study describes a decision support system for the university timetabling problem with instructor preferences, which uses Goal Programming (GP) as its modeling engine. The timetabling problem has been studied by many researchers and is an NP-complete problem. We model this difficult problem as a GP formulation and use its outputs in the decision support system. The GP model helps the user to consider the objectives of different parties involved in the problem. However, this increases the computational time of the model. Therefore, an iterative decision support system is proposed for generating the best scheduling alternative. Our model is tested using data from the Turkish Military Academy and its results are discussed.