A course timetabling formulation under pandemic considerations

The covid-19 pandemic has significantly affected the education sector and raised the new operational challenges that spring from the necessity of planning courses in a way to ensure community safety. Accordingly, many higher education institutions provide guidelines regarding the measures to be implemented in education operations. As such, timetabling of the courses is required to be carried out in line with these guidelines. To address this need, this study introduces a multi-objective mathematical model for a university course timetabling problem under the pandemic-related considerations. In particular, the proposed mathematical model aims to minimize the total number of online courses and sections while considering the balanced distribution of the courses over time slots and days. We test the effectiveness of the proposed model using real-life data. The results show that the proposed approach is able to create an optimal timetable in a reasonable time that addresses the objectives of the faculty administration and satisfies the pandemic-related requirements. The study contributes to the literature by introducing new pandemic constraints and inspires managers facing pandemic guidelines.