Scheduling Classrooms For The Beta Faculty

Date: 2010-10-08

Time: 15.30

Room: BBL 079

Speaker: Stephan Leemhuis

Title: Scheduling classrooms for the Beta Faculty

Abstract

Abstract:

Creating a schedule for the courses and their lessons in the Beta Faculty is completely done by hand. Given all the dependencies between the different lessons and the large amount of courses in the Faculty, the task is complex and very time-consuming. Planning all the lessons of a semester for the whole faculty takes several schedulers up to half a year. With the faculty's budget under pressure, it is important to deliver a tight-fitting schedule where the available rooms are used as efficiently as possible.

In this experimentation project, the department of computing science and the bureau for students and education (OSZ) cooperated to develop an automatic scheduling tool for the beta faculty. The tool is capable of planning the courses in a similar fashion as the schedulers, taking into account many factors to obtain a good quality schedule. The resulting schedule should form a basis in which most of the lessons are planned, and the scheduler can make some last changes to obtain a final schedule. The scheduling problem is solved using column generation.