Constraint-Based University Timetabling for the German University in Cairo

The course timetabling problem at the German University in Cairo has been in existence ever since the establishment of the university in 2003. Courses offered at the university, academic staff resources, and room resources make the problem over-constrained. Currently timetables are manually designed. The process is effort and time consuming and the results are often not satisfactory. In this paper, we provide a description of the problem and we show how it can be modeled as a constraint satisfaction problem. Our system, implemented in SICStus Prolog, generates a good timetable within some minutes instead of by hand some weeks.