University timetabling through conceptual modeling

Abstract

A number of approaches have been proposed in tackling the timetabling problem, such as operational research, human-machine interaction, constraint programming, expert systems, and neural networks. However, there are still several key challenges to be addressed: easily reformulated to support changes, a generalized framework to handle various timetabling problems, and ability to incorporate knowledge in the timetabling system. In this article, we propose an automatic software engineering approach, called task-based conceptual graphs, to addressing the challenges in the timetabling problem. Task-based conceptual graphs provide the automation of software development processes including specification, verification, and automatic programming. Maintenance can be directly performed on the specifications rather than on the source code; moreover, hard and soft constraints can be easily inserted or removed. A university timetabling system in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Central University is used as an illustrative example for the proposed approach.

Expert Systems and knowledge management for failure prediction to onshore pipelines: issue to Industry 4.0 implementation

“…The review of the literature comprises expert systems (ES) and knowledge management (KM) papers focused on decision-making support tools, which indicates application in different areas represents opportunities for further research. The application fields were identified in medicine (Chi et al, 2008;Kim, 2014;Li et al, 2018;Vihinen & Samarghitean, 2008), finance (Blue & Andoh-Baidoo, 2010;Shiue et al, 2008), education (Koutsantonis & Panayiotopoulos, 2011;Lee et al, 2005), engineering (Kumar, 2014), agriculture (Feng et al, 2009), insurance (Ruiz-Mezcua et al, 2011), environmental (Vacik et al, 2013) and construction (Hajdasz, 2014). The summary of the literature review is presented in Table 1.…”

Sequential Integer Programming for Solving Curriculum-Based University Course Timetabling Problem

“…In addition, in every assignment, the capacity of the classroom should be taken into consideration by making sure that there is no room capacity is exceeded. In general, the timetabling problem is to fix the sequence of meetings between lecturers and students in prefixed periods of time (typically a week); satisfying a set of constraints of various types [3].…”

“…In this work, we propose two stages sequential IP for solving CB-UTT for the real-world problem instance based on UMSLIC. In general, trying to model IP in one stage is harder as when the problem is decomposed into several stages [3], [4]. In the underlying study, hard and soft constraints are not solved directly all together at once, rather we divided the problem into two stages wherein the first stage, hard constraints are solved with pure 0-1 IP (to generate initial feasible solution) and in the second stage further improvement by employing simple local search for minimising soft constraints.…”