Examination staff scheduling model

It is a difficult and time consuming task for the personnel to prepare schedules that takes into considerations the demands of the students, educators and the administrators in academic institutions. In spite of the recent developments in the software and hardware technology, in most of the educational institutions the schedules are still prepared by hand and the desirable productivity cannot be achieved. In this research, in a higher educational institution in which nearly four thousand students are educated, exam staff scheduling problem has been studied. An integer programming model is developed in order to schedule nearly 150 exam supervisors to 12 different exam halls in a 10 days exam period, everyday in four different sessions. For the problem available exam halls have various capacities and physical conditions. Simple interfaces are prepared in order to simplify data input to the model. By the help of these interfaces it has been possible to input the excuses of the exam supervisors, and to open exam halls on the required day, on the required session and to supply enough number of exam supervisors to exam halls. Firstly the model was examined as the constraint satisfaction problem and it was solved in different dimensions. Then the model was turned into the optimization model by the help of the additional objective function and the best solution was achieved in desirable amount of time while solving the problem with different dimensions. At the last step by the help of the new additional constraints and the objective functions the model was considered as the goal programming problem, the appropriate solutions were found in an acceptable amount of time.