ELABORAÇÃO DE QUADROS DE HORÁRIOS DE AULAS PARA O INSTITUTO FEDERAL GOIANO: UMA ABORDAGEM HEURÍSTICA

Abstract

The generation of class schedules is an extremely complex and challenging task for all educational institutions, due to the combinatorial explosion of scheduling possibilities for teachers, classes, rooms, labs and other resources. In an Instituto Federal, such as IF Goiano - Rio Verde Campus, this task is compounded by the fact that: teachers have extensive and dispersed workloads across various courses; the vertical education system promoted by these institutions allows for classes at different levels of courses (technical courses, undergraduate, and postgraduate programs); and the sharing of resources such as classrooms, laboratories, and equipment. To aid in this administrative task, the use of computational tools for decision-making is justified, alleviating the human factor. From this pretext arises the research, which demonstrates promising results through a constructive heuristic that aims primarily to generate feasible schedules, followed by seeking improvements using the fix-and-optimize method. The constructive heuristic orders the disciplines through distinct rules and allocates them to generate new solutions, while respecting constraints of time conflicts. The local search is provided by a fix-and-optimize heuristic, in which some classes are fixed while classes from the same course are rearranged, allowing for consistent improvements. This work contributes to the advancement of Operations Research in the context of timetable generation, providing an efficient, flexible, and competitive alternative for creating class schedules at Instituto Federal Goiano, Rio Verde Campus. It is hoped that the final results of this research can positively impact academic management and facilitate the process of schedule planning.