Scheduling examinations to reduce second-order conflicts

The authors consider the problem of assigning groups of exams to time-slots such that the number of students having to take exams in two or more successive time-slots is minimized. The exam groups are assumed to be such that the number of students required to take two or more exams in the same group is minimum. The time-slots are such that the last slot of any day and the first slot of the following day are not considered back-to-back. The authors describe the application of a modified version of an approach proposed by Lucena for the time-dependent traveling salesman problem, to this problem. The method is tested on a variety of test problems including a real problem faced by a large university.