TIMELOG-an intelligent spreadsheet for school timetabling

Timetabling consists of manipulating a large file of teaching allocations within a set of constraints. There are available large wall charts with coloured stick-on squares which make the scheduling task a little easier; but most timetables are designed on a large sheet of paper divided into cells, each cell corresponding to a particular teaching period and holding data for a single allocation of teacher, class, room and subject. The computing equivalent of such a grid of cells is a spreadsheet. The process of manipulating data within the constraints of a set of rules is a task for which the programming language PROLOG is ideally suited. This paper outlines an attempt to combine the rule based approach of PROLOG with the interactive power of the spreadsheet to produce an intelligent design aid for a school timetabler.