Personalized course schedule planning using answer set programming

Abstract

Course scheduling or timetabling is a well-known problem that is generally studied from the perspective of schools; the goal is to schedule the courses, considering, e.g., the expected number of students, the sizes of the available classrooms, time conflicts between courses of the same category. We study a complementary problem to help the students during the course registration periods; the goal is to plan personalized course schedules for students, considering, e.g., their preferences over sections, instructors, distribution of the courses. We present a declarative method to compute personalized course schedules, and an application of this method using answer set programming, and discuss promising results of some preliminary user evaluations via surveys.