Rooms, timeslots, lecturers: a dissertation proposes an adaptive model to schedule academic resources at UnB
Éber Junio Borges Moreira defended at UnB’s PPCA a dissertation tackling academic resource scheduling in higher education institutions, with a case study on UnB itself.
Brasília, December 17, 2024
Allocating one room is easy. Allocating thousands of rooms across a full semester, with hundreds of instructors, thousands of courses, and constraints that change with every curriculum revision — that is a classic optimization problem robbing university coordinators of sleep across the country. The dissertation defended in December 2024 by Éber Junio Borges Moreira at UnB’s PPCA enters through that door, under the advising of Prof. Dr. Sergio Antônio Andrade de Freitas .
The work brings an adaptive academic resource scheduling model and tests it in a case study at the University of Brasília itself. The choice of scope matters: unlike generic models optimized for “average” cases, UnB offers a constraint matrix rich in detail — multiple campuses, interlocking prerequisites, faculty split between undergraduate and graduate teaching — that exposes the limits of traditional approaches.
By articulating software architecture with digital transformation of academic management systems, the author delivers a piece of interest not only to UnB but to any institution seeking to reduce the friction of semester start — the moment when the cost of poor allocation propagates for months.
The work is also connected to two publications by Éber with CEDIS: A CP-SAT Approach for Academic Resource Timetabling in Higher Education Institutions: A Case Study at a Major Public University, presented at IEEE ITHET 2024, and Fast University Timetabling via Room-wise CP-SAT Decomposition and Incremental Repair, published at SEMISH 2026 as a continuation of the same research agenda.
The defense took place on December 17, 2024 in Brasília. The examining committee was chaired by the advisor, Prof. Dr. Sergio Antônio Andrade de Freitas (UnB), and composed of Prof. Dr. Irene Pimenta Rodrigues (University of Évora, Portugal) and Prof. Dr. Andrea Felippe Cabello (UnB). Prof. Dr. Edna Dias Canedo, PPCA program coordinator, also attended the session.
The full text — written in Portuguese — is available at the UnB Institutional Repository.
About CEDIS: The Center for Studies, Development, and Innovation in Software (CEDIS), linked to the University of Brasília, researches and develops innovative software solutions.