University Exam Timetable and Invigilator Planner Benchmarked on ITC 2007 Datasets
Every semester, exam offices build timetables by hand and students end up with clashes, three papers in a row or exams in rooms that are too small, while invigilator duties are shared unfairly. Build an exam scheduler that assigns exams to slots and rooms, spreads each student's papers, assigns invigilators fairly, and is tested on the public ITC 2007 examination benchmark before being run on your own university's anonymised data.
Intermediate
A small team, or one strong student willing to learn something new.1 semester · 2 students
7 to ship
4 optional extrasSuggested stack
What you should ship
- A data model for exams, enrolments, rooms, slots, invigilators and their availability
- A constraint model with hard constraints (no clashes, room capacity, invigilator availability) and soft constraints (spread, no back-to-back, large exams early)
- Results on the ITC 2007 examination timetabling instances compared with published scores
- Fair invigilator assignment with workload limits and preferences
- A web interface for the exam office to load data, run the solver, lock some decisions and re-run
- Per-student and per-invigilator timetable views and exports
- A comparison with a past manual timetable on anonymised data, if your university agrees
If you have time left
- A local search improvement step after the constraint solver
- Handling special arrangements such as extra time and separate rooms
- Rescheduling a single exam after a disruption with minimal changes
- Clash reports that explain why no feasible timetable exists
The problem: clashes, crowding and unfair duties
Exam timetabling is one of the hardest scheduling jobs a university does. Thousands of students take different combinations of courses, rooms have limited seats and teachers must invigilate around their own commitments. Done by hand or in spreadsheets, timetables often have clashes, students with two or three exams in a row, and invigilation duties that fall on the same people. Changes late in the process cause chaos.
This is a different problem from weekly class timetabling: the goal is spreading each student's exams and fitting large exams into rooms, not repeating weekly patterns.
What already exists and the gap
- UniTime, an open-source university timetabling system that grew out of work at Purdue University, includes exam timetabling.
- Commercial timetabling products are used by large universities, usually with licensing costs.
- Spreadsheets remain the norm in many universities in South Asia and Africa.
The gap is a focused, modern tool for exam offices that is easy to run, explains its results, handles invigilators fairly and has published benchmark results so its quality can be judged.
Inspiration
The Second International Timetabling Competition (ITC 2007), organised by Barry McCollum and colleagues, defined an examination timetabling track with real-world constraints and public datasets, and many algorithms have been compared on them since. Earlier, Michael Carter, Gilbert Laporte and Sau Yan Lee described the Toronto benchmark instances in the Journal of the Operational Research Society (1996). Your project benchmarks against these before trying it on local data.
What you build
- Exam offices load enrolments and rooms, run the planner, lock decisions and publish timetables.
- Students see a personal timetable with no clashes and better spacing.
- Teachers see invigilation duties that respect availability and are fairly shared.
The technically interesting part
- Modelling. Translate hard and soft constraints into a CP-SAT model. Decide weights for soft constraints with the exam office.
- Scaling. Real instances are large. Use decomposition, symmetry breaking or a two-phase approach (exams to slots, then rooms and invigilators).
- Benchmarking honestly. Report your ITC 2007 scores alongside published ones, including where you lose.
- Explaining infeasibility. When no timetable fits, tell the office which constraints conflict.
How to evaluate it
- ITC 2007 scores per instance compared with published results.
- Local comparison: clashes, back-to-back exams and room overflows versus a past manual timetable.
- Fairness: spread of invigilation hours.
- Run time and the effect of time limits.
Suggested plan
- Weeks 1 to 3: study ITC 2007 and design the model.
- Weeks 4 to 7: solver for slots and rooms, benchmarking.
- Weeks 8 to 10: invigilators and fairness.
- Weeks 11 to 13: web interface, locks and exports.
- Weeks 14 to 15: local comparison, report and demo.
Path to a product
Universities, colleges and examination boards across South Asia and Africa schedule exams every term. A simple, hosted planner with proven benchmark results is a credible product, and universities are a market where a good first customer leads to others. The project shows optimisation skills that stand out on a CV.
Scope warning
Use anonymised student data only, with written permission from the exam office. Keep the first version to exams; do not try to also solve weekly class timetabling.
Learn what you need on Sefism
- DSA roadmap: graph colouring and search, the basis of timetabling.
- DSA and problem solving roadmap: backtracking and greedy patterns.
- Full-stack roadmap: the exam office interface.
- FastAPI tutorial: the solver API.
- PostgreSQL tutorial: the data model.
Get help with this idea
Teams often skip benchmarks and cannot show their solver is any good. Tauseef can help you set up the ITC 2007 comparison and the conversation with your exam office. If you are new here, create a free account first.
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