Examination scheduling: A computerized application

While the primary objective in examination scheduling is that no student should have more than one exam during the same period, most real-life cases have a large number of other complicating constraints that make the problem complex. These may include room availability constraints, prevention of exams in successive periods for the same student, incompatibility of a few exams with certain periods, etc. We describe the successful application of a graph-coloring based examination scheduling heuristic to the scheduling problem faced by the Freeman School of Business at Tulane University. The procedure, which is currently being used at the school, is easy to implement and handles all the issues in the problem including the room availability constraints simultaneously. Our computational experience indicates that the procedure is general and flexible enough to be easily adapted to exam scheduling problems at other small schools.