Teacher time schedule algorithm

Question

This is a problem I\'ve had on my mind for a long time. Being the son of a teacher and a programmer, it occurred to me early on... but I still haven\'t found a solution for it.<

Answer 1

One of the worst open source webpages ever, but the project looks promising: http://www.lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/

A web-based aproach:
phpScheduleIt (not school-specific)

Answer 2

I am one of the developer that works on the scheduler part of a student information system. During our original approach of the scheduling problem, we researched genetic algorithms to solve constraint satisfaction problems, and even though we were successful initially, we realized that there was a less complicated solution to the problem (after attending a school scheduling workshop)

Our current implementation works great, and uses brute force with smart heuristics to get a valid schedule in a short amount of time. The master schedule (assignment of the classes to the teachers) is first built, taking in consideration all the constraints that each teacher has while minimizing the possibility of conflicts for the students (based of their course requests). The students are then scheduled in the classes using the same method.

Doing this allows you to have the machine build a master schedule first, and then have a human tweak it if needed.

The scheduler current implementation is written in perl, but other options we visited early on were Prolog and CLIPS (expert system)