Academic Timetabling for Online Executive Programs with Existing Schedules, Faculty Preferences and Partial Precedence

This study addresses the problem of academic timetabling for short-term revenue generating online training programs. The goal of the problem is to find an assignment of faculty to various modules of the training program by incorporating faculty preferences for lecture topics without violating the precedence relation among lecture topics and by assigning the lectures as per faculty preference. We proposed an Integer Programming model and tested the applicability for a real short-term certification/Executive program in one of the premier institutes in India (IIT/IIM). We analyzed the importance of the fair distribution of modules among the faculties and provided the optimal faculty-module assignment for each slot.