A tabu search algorithm to schedule university examinations.
Scheduling examinations in a large university is an increasingly complex problem, due to its size, the growing flexibility of students' curricula and the interest in including a wide set of objectives and constraints. In this paper we present a new algorithm for this problem and its application to a university in Spain. A combination of heuristics, based on Tabu Search, first finds a solution in which no student has two exams simultaneously and then improves it by evenly spacing the...