A mathematical model for final exam schedule and an application

Exam scheduling problems are one of the major problems faced by universities. Despite the increase in the number of students in recent years, the existing classroom resources remain the same. Because of that, there are various problems in the examination programs. In the present case, the exam schedules are prepared manually based on the experience of the programmer without using any scientific method. As a result, there may occur many problems such as entering several exams or more than one hard exam on the same day. In order to overcome such problems, a mixed integer mathematical model for exam scheduling is proposed in this study. The proposed model is applied to Erciyes University, Department of Industrial Engineering and the final program of the 2016-2017 fall semester is established by using the CPLEX 12.6.1 optimization package program. The obtained exam schedule is compared with the schedule prepared by the research assistants. The final program obtained by the proposed method used fewer classrooms than the current final program, so the number of supervisors is reduced. On the other hand, the number of empty desks in the classrooms is minimized, hard exams are not scheduled on the same day and the time laps between exams are created in order to increase the performance of students