A practical approach to college timetable scheduling

Abstract

This paper formulates the college timetable scheduling (CTTS) as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) in a manner that is easy to implement. Timetable scheduling is a process that is revised in every academic session and requires a lot of constraint checking, so it is inefficient to check the same type of constraints repeatedly to create a proper schedule manually. CSP is a natural choice for automating this process. The prototype presented in this paper is aimed to offer such assistance in scheduling classes for different courses running in an academic session keeping given different constraint checking like the limit check of the maximum number of lectures that can be assigned to a faculty, limit check of the maximum number of lectures that can be assigned to a course, detecting conflicts between courses scheduled in the same time slots, preventing overlapping assignments for faculty members in the same time slots. Here, first, the different aspects of the timetable scheduling problem are addressed, and then a technique is devised to help map the problem as a CSP.