Goal programming approach to solve the timetabling problem at Turkish Military Academy

Abstract

The aim of this study is to propose a goal programming model to solve the timetabling problem at Turkish Military Academy. Since the problem is NPcomplete, it’s not easy to find an optimal solution all the time. It takes a lot of time of the people who are responsible to prepare the timetables of TMA. The model consists in all of the requirements, and is tested with the real data provided by Planning and Programming Department. Since the problem is so big to solve at once as a whole, a five-step iterative solution procedure is proposed. There are four priorities, three for teacher preferences and one for teaching loads. The model aims to minimize the deviations from the preferences and teaching loads of the teachers. Solution process produced a feasible and near-optimal timetable after four steps, in a reasonably short time compared to hand-made timetabling procedure. The result was improved by making some modifications in step five. In the conclusion, we mentioned the problems we faced, and presented our suggestions for future research.