  We address the thesis defence scheduling problem, a critical academic
scheduling management process, which has been overshadowed in the literature by
its counterparts, course timetabling and exam scheduling. Specifically, the
single defence assignment type of thesis defence scheduling problems, where
each committee is assigned to a single defence, scheduled for a specific day,
hour and room. We formulate a multi-objective mixed-integer linear programming
model, which aims to be a general representation of the problem mentioned
above, and that can, therefore, be applied to a broader set of cases than other
models present in the literature, which have a focus on the characteristics of
their universities. We introduce a new decision variable, propose constraint
formulations that are not policy specific, and offer new takes on the more
common objectives seen in the literature. We also include new objective
functions based on our experience with the problem at our university. We also
propose a two-stage solution approach. The first stage is employed to find the
number of schedulable defences, enabling the optimisation of instances with
unschedulable defences. The second stage is an implementation of the augmented
e-constraint method, which allows for the search of a set of different and
non-dominated solutions while skipping redundant iterations. A novel instance
generator for thesis scheduling problems is presented. Its main benefit is the
generation of the availability of committee members and rooms in availability
and unavailability blocks, resembling their real-world counterparts. A set of
96 randomly generated instances of varying sizes is solved and analysed. The
proposed method can find the optimal number of schedulable defences and present
non-dominated solutions within the set time limits for every tested instance.
