🚀 go-pugleaf

Allan Kashkin wrote:
> 
> Anyone know of a shareware or commercially available program for Macintosh
> that would crunch input of faculty hours/specific days-of-the-week
> availability along with departmental class-hour requirements?
> 
> Our college department has a number of fulltime and adjunct professors
> whose particular availability has us re-scheduling by hand as many as six
> or seven times until we can arrive at a workable plan each semester.
> 
> I've heard someone mention "Filemaker Pro" as a possibility, but have not
> had the time to look into it.  Is this a possibility?
> 
> Help!  Please!

[alt.winsock.programming] trimmed from newsgroup list  --  didn't see rel.

Think this is a difficult combinatorial problem which it might be
interesting to develop some heuristics for.  One strong heuristic
is to pattern the new schedule on previous successful schedules 
(this is typically what one does when scheduling by hand).  And there
are *lots* of constraints which might help in reducing the state
explosion:  who can teach what, size of classes versus available
rooms / lecture halls / whatever you call 'em, ditto suitability,
unavailable/reserved hours, distance to travel versus time between
lectures, and much more.  I'd suggest trying to find some expert on
operations research as well as one of those (perhaps now extinct?)
"knowledge engineers" whose job it was to ferret out expert
knowledge from the fumbling amateurs with "expert" status, plus
database expert.  In any event, a multidisciplinary approach.

One last suggestion:  check how they do it large educational
institutions.  At Bod� college where I'm teaching we only have about
3000+ students, and scheduling is done mostly by hand, with the
computer just as a passive tool.  Dynamic reservations and
cancellations of lecture rooms (what is the proper english word?)
is actually done by a single person at the student office, but
the initial plan is produced by the administration.

There have been several student projects aiming to automate this,
but none have succeeded  --  the programs can't compete with the
common sense (and pattern matching abilities?) of a person.


- Alf