Final exam scheduling is a subtopic of scheduling where various special requirements
with different levels of strictness should be managed. The formalisation of these
requirements can be a challenge in itself. The number of possible schedules that should
be examined is usually large, so the state space is vast. However, many of these schedules
can be excluded completely at an early stage based on their inconsistency with the
hard requirements, thus reducing the state space. The modelling approach for different
aspects of final exam scheduling problems is presented in this paper through the modelling
of an actual, complex problem. The created model was used as the basis for a state
space reduction method. The results show that the method could handle all the hard
and soft constraints of the problem and reduce the state space significantly based
on them. The modelling approach can be used for formalising the requirements of various
final exam scheduling and similar problems.
