Timetabling in Constraint Logic Programming

Generating timetables is a cumbersome and time consuming task, but programs developed to solve them are usually meant for a particular organisation and can not be easily adapted. Constraint Logic Programming, the result of generalizing Logic Programming uniication to constraint solving over a computation domain, aim at expressing constrained decision problems declaratively, and still solve them eeciently. DOMLOG is a CLP(FD) system, that extends CHIP with features such as user-deened heuristics, and more exible lookahead constraint solving. The adequacy of integrating heuristics and lookahead was discussed in previous work for a simpliied timetabling problem. This paper presents the main features of an expert system developed with DOMLOG to solve the timetabling problem for the Computer Science Department of the FCT/UNL.