An automatic course scheduling approach using instructors' preferences

Abstract

University Courses Timetabling problem has been extensively researched in the last decade. Therefore, numerous approaches were proposed to solve UCT problem. This paper proposes a new approach to process a sequence of meetings between instructors, rooms, and students in predefined periods of time with satisfying a set of constraints divided in variety of types. In addition, this paper proposes new representation for courses timetabling and conflict-free for each time slot by mining instructor preferences from previous schedules to avoid undesirable times for instructors. Experiments on different real data showed the approach achieved increased satisfaction degree for each instructor and gives feasible schedule with satisfying all hard constraints in construction operation. The generated schedules have high satisfaction degrees comparing with schedules created manually. The research conducts experiments on collected data gathered from the computer science department and other related departments in Jordan University of Science and Technology-Jordan.