Constructing University Timetable using CSP Model

Abstract

Timetable problem is a well-known multidimensional, constraint assignment problem that focuses in the assignment of courses to faculty members in classrooms within limited time slots. Hence, it is a challenging time-consuming problem facing universities and it belongs to the NP-hard class of problems. In particular, universities regularly need an optimal solution for the course timetable problem. However, a manual solution to this problem by considering all constraints usually requires a long time and hard work to offer proper, optimized solution. Specifically, timetabling problem scan be modeled as Constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs), which are combinatorial in nature. This paper introduces a model that applies the timetabling as a CSP model. The system is able to produce a time table for UCS(Mandalay). The proposed model is tested against real data obtained from UCS (Mandalay) that has a so sophisticated timetable with much interlaced, limited resources and limited time slots.