A Study of Approaches for Academic Scheduling Problems

There are various tasks and activities within academic institutions to perform and manage. These tasks and activities are of different types: administrative, technical, or pedagogical. Their number is very remarkable considering the size of the university establishments and the important number of structures and personnel attached to them, which does not cease increasing with the passing of time, the appearance of new disciplines, and the consecutive integration of new students, teachers, and personnel of all kinds. To manage all these activities, it is therefore very important to use efficient means, including computerized management systems. Moreover, one of the essential activities that must be managed in the university is the planning or generation of schedules. This area has attracted the attention of researchers who are interested in solving combinatorial problems, methods of solving NP-hard problems, the digitization of academic institutions, and the automatic generation of different academic tasks. This problem has been solved with different methods and techniques in order to achieve satisfactory planning that respects various physical and pedagogical constraints. This paper aims to present some concepts about this research area and some methods applied in order to solve this kind of problem.