Informatica 35 (2011) 157-164 157 A Sequential Three-Stage Integer Goal Programming (IGP) Model for Faculty-Course-Time-Classroom Assignments Raed Al-Husain, Mohamad K. Hasan and Hameed Al-Qaheri * Department of Quantitative Methods and Information Systems College of Business Administration, Kuwait University, Kuwait E-mail: raed@cba.edu.kw, mkamal@cba.edu.kw, alqaheri@cba.edu.kw Keywords: integer goal programming, timetabling, university scheduling problem Received: March 19, 2010 Developing university schedules that could take into account factors such as faculties’ preferences to courses, timeslots, and classrooms, in a timely fashion while being unbiased and meeting university requirements, is a hurdle in many universities around the world.This paper exploits the use of three- stage integer goal programming (IGP) technique to solve the university scheduling problem, as an expansion of an earlier two-stage model attempt conducted by the authors. Segmenting the problem into three stages enabled reaching a complete schedule in a timely manner and a high satisfactory level among faculties, while meeting all university requirements. The output of every stage is used as an input to the following stage, and goals are satisfied using the priority sequence approach according to their order of importance based on some college, department, and major regulations and requirements. Povzetek: Z novo metodo IGP naredijo univerzitetni urnik. * Corresponding Author 1 Introduction The utilization of optimization techniques to ensure more efficient and effective operational workflow has long been a major factor in the success of organizations in different industries; hence the need for such techniques in the educational sector is no exception. Scheduling problems in universities, such as offering required courses at the same time on the same day, assigning the wrong class size to the wrong classroom, inevitable biased faculty-course assignment, and relatively long time to complete the schedule have all been problematic issues associated with using manual and judgmental approaches when developing course schedules. This paper exploits the use of three-stage integer goal programming (IGP) technique to solve the university scheduling problem, as an expansion of an earlier two- stage model attempt conducted by the authors [12]. The three-stage model is developed and solved in a sequential order, where faculties assigned to courses, courses assigned to different time slots, and then time slots assigned to classrooms respectively. In our approach, each stage is optimally solved such that the outputs of each stage are fed as inputs to the following stage. In every stage, university, college, and departments regulations are considered as a set of goals to be achieved along with faculties’ preferences. The model has been tested at the College of Business Administration in Kuwait University using Excel Premium Solver. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 present a selective review of literature, Section 3 covers the Three-Stage integer goal programming(IGP) model formulation, Section 4 cover the experimentation and discusses the results of the three stages follow by an overall analysis and assessment of the three stage model in section, conclusion and future research are discussed in Section 6. 2 Review of literature The idea of developing sophisticated models to solve the university scheduling problem has been around since the early 70s [14] [11]. The techniques used range from the utilization of optimization models to complex heuristics models. Some models solved the problem of faculties’ assignment to courses only [23] [6]. Other models took into consideration the time slot factors as well [10] [6][7][15][17] and some models took into account faculty-time-classroom assignment [13][1][2]. Most of the work mentioned used the approach of decomposing the problem into distinct and interrelated stages versus the approach of solving the problem as a complex single stage model. Using such approach has the advantage of significantly reducing computation time while finding a relatively satisfying solution. Heuristics approaches and the aid of decisions support systems have also been utilized to solve the university scheduling problem in order to overcome complexities that could arise from using optimization techniques. The major reason of using such approaches