The design and implementation of an interactive course-timetabling system

We describe the design and implementation of a multi-objective course-timetabling system for the Science Division at Rollins College. In the traditional vertex-coloring approach to timetabling, all conflicts are regarded as equally undesirable, but when all such conflicts are considered, including those that might involve only one or two students, a conflict-free timetable is rarely attainable. A more realizable objective is to minimize total conflict severity, where conflicts are assigned different levels of severity. This is a more natural model for an actual timetabling problem, where the undesirability of assigning various pairs of courses to overlapping timeslots varies significantly. Our second objective is to create timetables that result in relatively compact schedules for the professors and students.