A Constraint-Based Dental School Timetabling System

sure to reduce costs while improving service delivery. A central component to this effort is the availability of timetabling systems that can find practical solutions to maximizing the utilization of teaching resources, such as facilities and staff, while not compromising on education quality. Traditional university timetabling is often concerned with the task of assigning a number of events, such as lectures, exams, meetings, and so on, to a limited set of time slots (and perhaps rooms), in accordance with a set of constraints (Cambazard et al. 2004). Three main classes of the university timetabling problem have been identified: school (Kingston 2012), course (Cambazard et al. 2012), and examination timetabling (Burke et al. 2012). A fundamental constraint appearing in all the problems is the “event-clash” constraint. This states that if a student is required to be present for a pair of events, for example, courses, then these must not be assigned to the same time slot, as such an assignment will result in this student having to be in two places at the same time. This particular constraint can be found in almost all university timetabling problems (Bonutti et al. 2012; McCollum et al. 2010). The problem restricted to these constraints alone can be viewed as a graph coloring problem. Figure 1 shows an example. The nodes correspond to events to be assigned, and the colors denote the different values that can be asigned. Two nodes are linked if they can not be assigned to the same time slot, and thus, must be colored differently. These constraints arise from the conflicts for all participating students and teachers. Articles