Developing an online examination timetabling system using artificial bee colony algorithm in higher education

Educational timetabling is a fundamental problem impacting schools and universities’ effective operation in many aspects. Different priorities for constraints in different educational institutions result in the scarcity of universal approaches to the problems. Recently, COVID-19 crisis causes the transformation of traditional classroom teaching protocols, which challenge traditional educational timetabling. Especially for examination timetabling problems, as the major hard constraints change, such as unlimited room capacity, non-invigilator and diverse exam durations, the problem circumstance varies. Based on a scenario of a local university, this research proposes a conceptual model of the online examination timetabling problem and presents a conflict table for constraint handling. A modified Artificial Bee Colony algorithm is applied to the proposed model. The proposed approach is simulated with a real case containing 16,246 exam items covering 9,366 students and 209 courses. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach can satisfy every hard constraint and minimise the soft constraint violation. Compared to the traditional constraint programming method, the proposed approach is more effective and can provide more balanced solutions for the online examination timetabling problems.