An Automated Approach to University Course Timetabling Focused on Professor Assignment

Course timetabling represents a common and often daunting problem in universities. Manual solutions are labor-intensive and, if larger enough, even impossible to achieve. Our approach is focused on professor assignments to courses, specifically addressing their preferences for each time slot. We carry out a Post-Enrolment guided formulation but clustering the students in groups that are enrolled to courses. Our motivation stems from automating the timetabling process regarding the context of size-reduced universities in Uruguay, with potential applicability to other South American institutes. Thus, room assignment and capacity restrictions are excluded in our present scope. Our formulation was tested for the 1<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">st_</sup> grade courses at the Facultad de Ingeniería of the Universidad de Montevideo (UM) –5 groups of approximately 30 students–, yielding reliable solutions using the Gurobi 10 solver. Future work involves more comprehensive cases and practical implementation for real-world timetabling decisions at UM. For this reason, we aim to define rules mapping special or abstract requirements to our numerical scale priorities parameter.