School timetabling for quality student and teacher schedules

TLDR: The school timetabling problem, although less complicated than its counterpart for the university, still provides a ground for interesting and innovative approaches that promise solutions of high quality, and in this work, a Shift Assignment Problem is solved first and work shifts are assigned to teachers.

Abstract: The school timetabling problem, although less complicated than its counterpart for the university, still provides a ground for interesting and innovative approaches that promise solutions of high quality. In this work, a Shift Assignment Problem is solved first and work shifts are assigned to teachers. In the sequel, the actual Timetabling Problem is solved while the optimal shift assignments that resulted from the previous problem help in defining the values for the cost coefficients in the objective function. Both problems are modelled using Integer Programming and by this combined approach we succeed in modelling all operational and practical rules that the Hellenic secondary educational system imposes. The resulting timetables are conflict free, complete, fully compact and well balanced for the students. They also handle simultaneous, collaborative and parallel teaching as well as blocks of consecutive lectures for certain courses. In addition, they are highly compact for the teachers, satisfy the teachers' preferences at a high degree, and assign core courses towards the beginning of each day.