Another timetabling approach

All over the world, automatic university timetabling has been a difficult problem to solve. The authors have thus developed an interactive timetabling system for the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, based on concepts of decision support and expert systems, that attempts to overcome the weaknesses of previous methods. The system uses several criteria to qualify a proposed timetable, whose relative importance may be adjusted by the user. The weighting of the criteria is a subjective factor affecting the system globally and the solution proposed by the system might not reflect, locally, the expectations of the user when he/she defined the weights. To overcome this problem, the system is highly interactive, allowing the user to test and compare alternative scenarios based on local modifications, providing for each, a total weight that measures the quality of the scenarios. The system also provides very complete report writing capabilities. Finally, the sophisticated graphical interface provided by the system, greatly facilitates the user´s dialog. The authors describe the main features of their timetabling system