Fairness in Academic Course Timetabling
Moritz M\"uhlenthaler, Rolf Wanka

TL;DR
This paper addresses fair course timetabling in universities by proposing formulations based on max-min fairness and Jain's index, introducing new measures for timetable fairness, and evaluating an optimization algorithm to improve fairness with minimal constraint violations.
Contribution
It introduces two novel fairness formulations for course timetabling and develops an optimization algorithm with new measures for assessing timetable fairness.
Findings
Fair solutions can be achieved with minimal increase in soft constraint violations.
Existing solutions are already quite fair according to Jain's index.
New fairness measures impact algorithm performance significantly.
Abstract
We consider the problem of creating fair course timetables in the setting of a university. Our motivation is to improve the overall satisfaction of individuals concerned (students, teachers, etc.) by providing a fair timetable to them. The central idea is that undesirable arrangements in the course timetable, i.e., violations of soft constraints, should be distributed in a fair way among the individuals. We propose two formulations for the fair course timetabling problem that are based on max-min fairness and Jain's fairness index, respectively. Furthermore, we present and experimentally evaluate an optimization algorithm based on simulated annealing for solving max-min fair course timetabling problems. The new contribution is concerned with measuring the energy difference between two timetables, i.e., how much worse a timetable is compared to another timetable with respect to max-min…
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