SCHEDULING EXAMINATIONS TO REDUCE 2ND-ORDER CONFLICTS

We consider the problem of assigning groups of exams to time-slots such that the number of students having to take exams in two or more successive time-slots is minimized. The exam groups are assumed to be such that the number of students required to take two or more exams in the same group is minimum. The time-slots are such that the last slot of any day and the first slot of the following day are not considered back-to-back. We describe the application of a modified version of an approach proposed by Lucena [Networks 20, 753-763 (1990)] for the time-dependent traveling salesman problem, to this problem. The method is tested on a variety of test problems including a real problem faced by a large university.