University Automated Timetabling

Abstract

Automated school timetabling has been a goal for a long time, but the high combinations of this problem have maintained these systems in the academic research field, with very few successful commercial applications. To solve this problem several methodologies, such as scheduling, constraint programming, and genetic algorithms have been applied with relative success. This article describes an implementation of a timetable generator that uses constrained heuristic search, combining constraint programming with search techniques. This system was conceived to work in a university with seven thousand students.