New Slot-Based Scheduling (NSBS)

University timetabling involves several requirements that are difficult to satisfy simultaneously: pedagogically appropriate spacing between class meetings, compact schedules for students and instructors, and efficient classroom utilization. A common approach in timetabling research is to formulate constraints and apply optimization algorithms to minimize undesirable outcomes. This paper introduces New Slot-Based Scheduling (NSBS), developed at FPT University in 2022, based on two successive ideas: simplifying the temporal structure by replacing Slot2 with Slot3, and constructing timetables from a cyclically reusable seed. The most difficult step was identifying the first seed timetable whose daily cyclic shifts would place subsequent classes into previously empty cells without generating conflicts. Following this breakthrough, the same underlying idea made it substantially easier to construct three additional seeds suited to practical academic configurations. The four seed timetables cover four or five face-to-face courses and institutional teaching weeks of five or six days. They accommodate differences between semesters with or without an online MOOC and differences in classroom capacity across campuses. Direct examination of the resulting timetables shows that, under the specified standard assumptions, all four configurations meet the pedagogical requirements, eliminate student and instructor windows, and fill all available room-time cells of the classrooms assigned to each cluster. NSBS suggests an alternative to optimizing within a fixed temporal structure: redesign the structure and its seed timetables so that the relevant l conflicts disappear in the standard setting.