This study seeks to find an optimal allotment of time slots to courses, imperative in an institutional setting like IIT Delhi

where the various departments assign slots to courses in an uncoordinated manner, causing problems to students wanting to do cross-department courses. The input is a set of course choices by the students and constraints on the slots of courses, the objective function is the number of students who are able to do more than a fixed number of courses given an allotment and the output is a valid slot allotment which maximizes the value of the objective function. The problem was modeled on graph theory and different optimization algorithms like max k-cut algorithm, genetic algorithm, alternate path algorithm for bipartite matching and simulated annealing were modified and hybridized according to the needs of the problem to yield an approximate algorithm. In another approach, the problem was modeled on network flows and linear programming methods were used to find the max flow. The code was developed and tested on simulated data for 8 different semesters, and found to produce results which were on an average 50 % better than the institute allotment. These results are conclusive and if implemented, this project can be of a great help to the student community.