Publication details
Teacher-oriented Fairness in Course Timetabling
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling (PATAT-2016) |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Informatics |
| Keywords | Course Timetabling; Fairness; Multi-objective approach; Timetabling system; UniTime; Real-world problem; Search |
| Description | Fairness introduces an important optimization criterion which needs to be handled at a reasonable level to generate acceptable timetables for particular entities. We propose an extension of the fairness measure which truly reflects the preferences of entities such as teachers or classical curricula. An incremental algorithm for the fairness measure computation is proposed for inclusion in iterative or constructive search algorithms. We demonstrate its inclusion into the iterative forward search al- gorithm. The implementation is available as a part of the complex UniTime system for course and examination timetabling. We apply our approach on real-life problems from Masaryk University and show improvements in fairness for teachers at a cost which is a very reasonable compromise with other objective functions. In addition, we demonstrate that a weighted inclusion of a fairness criteria allows us to achieve a proper balance with respect to other objective functions. |