Scheduling small groups examinations (minimising resources required by optimal clustering of student groups)

This article presents an integer programming model that was built to minimise cost-resources associated with the logistics of organising college examinations featuring large numbers of class sections with small numbers of students in each. The problem being inherently NP-hard, its initial formulation problem reveals a great deal of computational intractability, because of large numbers of binary variables and constraints. To overcome this difficulty, a facility layout method is used to decompose the initial problem into smaller independent subproblems. An iterative heuristic approach is later designed to solve each of the subproblems.