Solving a practical examination timetabling problem via abductive reasoning and integer programming

Scheduling of examination dates is a complex process that affects student satisfaction at higher education institutions. The literature refers to this as the timetabling problem. Formally, it consists in assigning a series of events to certain timetable blocks within a given time interval, limited by a set of constraints, some of which must be strictly adhered to (hard), while others are only desirable (soft). This paper proposes and validates a mathematical model for scheduling at a university in Colombia. The main paper’s contribution is that the model is aimed at improving student satisfaction compared to the scheduling performed previously by the university. The methodology is based on an abductive vision of operations research with five stages where a mixed-integer linear programming model was proposed, and it was validated in a real-life instance. The results show a 38.9% average reduction in contiguous exams.