Exam Timetabling Using Graph Colouring Approach

Nowadays, many methods exist for the scheduling problem but it only perform well in particular isolated environments and cannot cope with the changing requirements of large educational institutions. At this time, exam timetabling at Foundation Studies and Extension Education (FOSEE), MMU has been departmentally led and the construction of the timetables is done manually. The purpose of this research is to investigate the current exam timetable system in order to understand the current processes and problems involved during preparing the timetables and to propose a cluster heuristic and graph colouring heuristic approach to solve exam timetabling problem in FOSEE, MMU. Semi-structured interview and literature review are the method that used for data gathering. Semi-structured interview help in collecting data and information about the current system and the problem faces by the user. While literature review help in search and analyze the best approach that can help to solve the problem in the exam timetable including the cluster heuristic, sequential heuristic, cased-based approach, meta-heuristic, integer programming approach, knowledge base approach and graph colouring. This study presents a solution method for exam timetable problem in FOSEE, MMU. The method of solution is a heuristic approach that include graph colouring, cluster heuristic and sequential heuristic