Course Scheduling As A Constraint Satisfaction Problem

This paper describes a scheduling system to fullll the timetabling needs of the Computer Science program at Florida Institute of Technology. The system handles both general constraints of timetabling problems and constraints speciic to our problem. It has the exibility of allowing for either manual or automatic assignments. The scheduling process is split into two phases; each phase is modeled as a CSP. The rst phase tackles resource allocation which is, in our case, the problem of assigning faculty to courses. The second phase tackles the problem of assigning consistent time slots to courses. Optimization techniques are used in both phases. The rst phase optimizes faculty assignment to courses in terms of faculty preferences. The second phase optimizes time slot assignment in terms of diierences with previous term. The main goal of the system is to provide high quality timetables to the Computer Science program with as little delay as possible. This goal was fulllled as experiments on real data showed that ideal solutions are generally obtained in a few seconds.