Planning personnel timetable: A network model for an academic application

Personnel timetabling, a problem present in a wide diversity of administrative scenarios, can become a challenging undertaking for a computationally expensive heuristic solution procedure, implemented by hand with the use of a spreadsheet in an academic context. The case of the Pontificia Bolivariana University at Bucaramanga (UPB.BGA) Colombia has become particularly challenging due to the ever increasing number of both, students enrolled and faculty members hired during the last ten years. A two-phase solution approach is being implemented: the first phase, planning, determines the requirements, creates early scenarios of aggregated timetables for each faculty member and each course, and assesses them. The second phase, programming, provides the final detailed academic timetable for each faculty member enforcing the natural constraints of the problem and the institutional regulations that apply. The proposed integer programming (IP) model for the planning phase and the computational results of the model applied to an actual scenario from the Faculty of Industrial Engineering at UPB.BGA corresponding to the second semester of year 2013 are presented. Avenues for future work on this application based on this particular scenario are discussed.