UTSE: Construction of Optimum Timetables for University Courses - A CLP Based Approach

The construction of timetables for universities or schools is an extremely complex problem, whose manual solution requires much effort. The set of all possible solutions, that is the search space of the problem, is very large, at least in the realworld examples. An acceptable solution is one that satisfies all the problem constraints. The problem becomes even more difficult if someone wants to generate an optimum timetable according to some heuristic criteria. Various attempts have been made so far on the automatic solving of the timetabling problem by a computer. In this paper, a method is proposed for the construction of optimum timetables for university courses. A specific system is presented which has been used for the timetabling procedure of the Department of Informatics of the University of Athens. The software platform of the implementation is an instance of the Constraint Logic Programming class of languages, the ECLPS system. ECLPS is proved to be an appropriate vehicle for managing the complexity of the timetabling problem.

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