A Mathematical model for planning of class timetables an application in Turkish Military Academy

A timetabling problem of an educational institution involves scheduling a large number of classes, teachers and courses to a number of periods while satisfying a set of constraints of various types. The aim of this study is to find good and satisfactory solutions for the timetabling problem of Turkish Military Academy in shorter time when compared to the manual timetabling process. An integer programming model which has the appropriate facilities for providing valuable help to the scheduler to implement a good timetable of Turkish Military Academy and a solution strategy for this model is presented. The model satisfies the teachers' preferences to a sufficient degree by using suitable objective function coefficients. These coefficients penalize the assignment of teachers to the periods which they do not prefer. They also enable us to assign the part-time teachers at their available periods prior to the full-time ones. In addition, the solution strategy proposed is based on grouping sections and teachers, and on allocating teacher groups to section groups iteratively in such a way that the output data of an iteration will be added to the input data of the next one. This grouping strategy made it possible to decompose the problem into the problems of smaller sizes. The solution found by the implementation of the model in this study satisfies all problem requirements and minimizes the objective function. It is near- optimal within the iteration limits and is found in several hours. The timetable constructed has only one non-preferred period for only one teacher. Besides, the time consumed for this model is very short when compared with the manual timetabling. Thus, it is said to be "a good timetable" both for the teachers and the scheduler. IX