A Survey on Exam Scheduling Techniques

Timetabling is a common problem faced in various organizations and is the most important issue every University has to solve. It is one of the computationally difficult problems in scheduling the exams without conflicts. Scheduling problems can arise in different situations, but most of the times it is referred to scheduling of exams in educational institutions. In fact, examination-timetabling is an important area to be studied and a number of researches have been developed in this area. Many novel researches that focused on modeling and formulating examination-timetabling problems are studied and analyzed in this study. Depending on the nature of the scheduling problem, the objective may vary from one research to another to find the most feasible solution that can cope with a specific environment. This literature survey focuses on examining the major solution approaches for the timetabling problem and compare them, in order to provide directions for academicians and researchers for further work.