Interactively Solving School Timetabling Problems Using Extensions of Constraint Programming

Abstract

Timetabling problems have been frequently studied due to their wide range of applications. However, they are often solved manually because of the lack of appropriate computer tools. Although many approaches mainly based on local search or constraint programming seem to have been quite successful in recent years, they are often highly dedicated to specific problems and encounter difficulties to take the dynamic and over-constrained nature of such problems. We were confronted with such an over-constrained and dynamic problem in our institution. This paper deals with a timetabling system based on constraint programming with the use of explanations to offer a dynamic behaviour and to allow automatic relaxations of constraints. Our tool has successfully answered the needs of the current planner by providing solutions in a few minutes instead of a week of manual design. We present in this paper the techniques used, the results obtained and a discussion on the effects of the automation of the timetabling process.3 An option is a topic or an area of study chosen by a student to specialize in during his last year.

Minimal Perturbation Problem in Course Timetabling

“…Dynamic changes in the context of timetabling problems were first studied in [6]. Issues of interactive timetabling which needs to handle dynamic aspects of the problem were discussed in [3,13,12]. A survey of existing approaches to dynamic scheduling can be found in [9].…”

“…3 with comparison between criteria 3 and 4). The solver returns good results in reasonable time (e.g., in 30 minutes time limit) when the total sum of the weights used in additional criteria (3)(4)(5)(6)(7) in the first level corresponds to one half of the weight V wconf,1 (2). The weights in the second level usually correspond to the weights used for the solution quality comparison (W student , W time , W room , and W constr ).…”

“…Our problem solver is based on constraint satisfaction techniques [4] which are frequently applied to solve timetabling problems [7,3,15,12]. Moreover, dynamic constraint satisfaction [18,11,17] is able to cover dynamic aspects in the problem.…”

Using particle swarm optimization to solve effectively the school timetabling problem

“…It usually refers to exam or course timetabling at a high school or a university (Smith et al 2003;Cambazard et al 2005). There are three basic constituent parts of educational timetabling: course/university timetabling, exam timetabling and school timetabling (McCollum 2006;Qu et al 2006).…”

Modeling and Solution of a Complex University Course Timetabling Problem

“…If they do, the larger university timetabling problem may be decomposed into a series of departmental problems with little likelihood of creating class time assignment conflicts for students. A number of individual departmental or school level problems have been studied in the literature [9,1,5,17]. The problem becomes more complex, however, when students attend courses from multiple academic units and the solutions are dependent upon the availability of students for the classes across multiple problems.…”