Edge Minimizing the Student Conflict Graph

Academic timetabling is the task of scheduling courses to specific times in such a way that there are no conflicts. Most of the models considered in the literature assume that this conflict information is already known. However in many real life timetabling problems, courses are taught in multiple sections and until a student is assigned to a specific section of a course, the conflict information is not known. M.W. Carter [Car00] sums it up nicely "When courses are offered in multiple sections as they are at Waterloo, it creates a timetabling paradox. Students request a course, but timetabling assigns days and times to course sections. We cannot assign times to sections until we know which students are in each section. But we cannot assign students to sections until we know when the sections are timetabled!"