A literature review for course scheduling problem

Abstract

The timetabling of courses and examinations is a challenging and time consuming activity for all educational institutions, especially universities. The course scheduling problem is a type of timetabling problem that is concerned with assigning a number of courses and instructors to the most suitable classrooms and time-slots, subject to some constraint structures on characteristics of the problem and institutions. In this paper, we analyze the main points of the outstanding studies that have conducted on the problem since 1960. In addition, solution approaches that have been applied by researchers to solve the problem, including operations research based methods, metaheuristic-based methods and some novel methods are analyzed.