Date of Award

Spring 2011

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering

Program/Concentration

Engineering Management

Committee Director

Ghaith Rabadi

Committee Member

Resit Unal

Committee Member

Christopher J. Garcia

Call Number for Print

Special Collections LD4331.E555 K65 2011

Abstract

The focus of this thesis is the educational timetabling problem, which is a very challenging problem to solve especially with a high number of the departments, branches, classes, and students. Due to the large scale of educational timetabling problems and preferences of the stakeholders, it is almost impossible to form a general model that solves all of the timetabling problems in the literature. This resulted in the need to develop and employ specific models for specific institutions.

The purpose of this study is to develop a mathematical programming model that solves the examination timetabling problem in Turkish Air Force Academy (TUAF A). Primarily, the constraints are expressed in mathematical form to generate the model which takes into account examination conflicts, classroom capacities, seating plan restriction and exam spread (i.e. at most two examinations in three consecutive examination timeslots). The model is solved using IBM OPL Studio, the results are obtained and further analyses are conducted. Since there are not general data in the literature to verify the model, the verification is done by trying different instances of the problem and the results of these instances are compared. Although the solution of the developed model satisfies all of the hard and soft constraints, utilization of classrooms is observed to be at low level which may need to be increased depending on the users' preferences. To address this issue, the constraint satisfaction model is extended into an optimization model by introducing an objective function, new constraints and new decision variables. The results of the new optimization model increased classrooms' utilization by 53%. With higher classroom utilization as a result of the optimization model, fewer classrooms are needed, and therefore, fewer proctors and other related resources will be needed.

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DOI

10.25777/s60a-dj31

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