University Timetabling Problem with Mathematical Two Stage Modeling

In the university timetabling problem, necessity of considering variables corresponding to lessons, teachers, classes, days of the week and hours bring about a large scale mix integer linear programming problem. Usually the problem is so big that the exact mathematical programming solvers can not solve them in a small period of time. So variety of heuristic algorithms is proposed to solve such problems. In this paper we describe the problem and formulate it as a mix integer linear problem (MILP) then we decompose the problem into two smaller (MILP) that can be solved by exact solvers at the small period of time. based on proposed model, we have made software for timetabling the lessons at the university. This software is used for scheduling the lessons in mathematics faculty of Iranian university of science and technology at second semester of 1382-1383. The result is presented and compared with the traditional timetabling.