A computer-assisted final examination scheduling system for the Naval Postgraduate School

Abstract

This thesis designs, develops and tests a computer-assisted system to construct final examination schedules at the Naval Postgraduate School. The system is based on a greedy heuristic that produces high quality solutions for 200 examinations in a few minutes on a personal computer. Comparisons between computer constructed schedules and the manual schedule for the 1994 winter quarter show the manual schedule's superiority. Despite this observation, the computer system's ability to rapidly produce feasible schedules (approximately 15 minutes compared to 5 days) makes it ideal to assist the schedulers and to conduct policy studies. One policy study conducted in this thesis shows a reduction in classrooms reserved solely for final exams has little impact on the quality of the schedule. Another policy study shows the difficulty of finding any schedule without some students having back-to-back examinations.