Bullet TimeTabler Education – System demonstration

The problem of creating timetables for Educational Institutions is typically defined as the scheduling of a set of lessons involving teachers and students, on a set of classrooms, in certain time slots, considering a number of constraints (Schaerf 1999; Bonutti et al. 2012). Throughout an academic year, in every Educational Institution, a considerable number of days and human resources are spent trying to find, manually, a solution that respects all the existing rules (a feasible solution) and that, at the same time, can meet the expectations of all participants (a quality solution). Due to its combinatorial nature and associated complexity, this is one of the most studied problems by the scientific community and by the Operational Research area in particular (Schaerf 1999; Murray et al. 2007). This paper presents the product Bullet TimeTabler Education (BTTE), an automatic and optimized generator of timetables. This software application is the result of the work carried out by Bullet Solutions since 2005. BTTE has been updated and improved over the years with the contributions from almost all the Portuguese Higher