Exam Timetable Generation for Universities / School Systems

Question

Has anyone developed a workflow to generate an exam timetable for a large system. Trying to optomise a timetable for some 18,000 students taking 100 subjects and a 15 day window for exams.

BenMoss · Answer

Hi Gary,

After reading that my brains a bit fried given the number of parameters that you would need to include.

I don't think we're going to be lucky enough for someone to see this thread and also have approached the same problem. What I'd perhaps recommend doing is looking at whether people have solved this problem in either R or Python online, both languages that are supported within the Alteryx platform, alternatively, @SydneyF may be able to offer more guidance but I think the problem is as it's complex the time required to even offer some help may be too much!

I've created a simplified example which takes into account students, exams and timeslots only, without the complexities of rooms, different exam lengths and not having students in back-to-back sessions.

I do think it would be easy to simplify the model so that it selects to do the exams in the shortest timeframe possible (say you specify a 60 day window just to make sure it's possible but then you want to minimize the number of days).

Perhaps this is useful.

Ben

ExamOptimization.yxzp

GaryMolloy · Answer

Thank you.

This is a complex but well research wicked problem. More can be found here: Data sets are available here: http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszrq/data.htm

BenMoss · Answer

Hi Gary, it doesn't look like anyone has anything up their sleeves with this to share, do you have any sample data which would allow us to mock something up for you using the optimization tool?

I've recently worked on a project which assigned students to teachers so I'm sure some of the learning I had from that is transferable.

It may be worth reading this blog on the community as a getting started with optimzation.

Ben