System Demonstration of Interactive Course Timetabling

This system demonstration presents an approach to interactive timetabling used by the UniTime university timetabling system. This application, which is publicly available under an open source license, has been successfully applied at Purdue University [8], a large public university (39,000 students) with a broad spectrum of programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The complete system includes course timetabling, examination timetabling, event management, and student sectioning. UniTime has a completely web-based interface using the Enterprise Edition of Java (J2EE). Hibernate is used to persist data in an SQL-enabled relational database (e.g., MySQL or Oracle) and an XML interface can be used to tie the application with other systems used by a university. The course timetabling, examination timetabling and student sectioning problems are modeled as constraint satisfaction and optimization problems (CSOP) and solved using the solver library [3]. This constraint-based local search framework has also been successfully applied to the International Timetabling Competition 2007, where it was among the finalists in all three tracks and the winner of two [4]. A major goal of the system design has been to facilitate requests for changes in the timetable that inevitably occur. Interactive timetabling was previously explored in [7], concentrating on interactive removal of clashes. [1] investigated explanations in constraint programming to handle dynamic changes in the timetable. Generation of a timetable was interactively controlled by the user in [2]. Earlier work by the present authors also examined construction of a timetable using minimal changes to an initial solution [5]. The work pre-