Educational Timetabling Algorithms and Data Structure - Literature review Example

Fully automated educational timetabling is one of the main problems that tackle database designers, in fact, the problem was addressed rather extensively in many kinds of literature and from different aspects, and others were suggesting different and semi-solution approaches to the problem (Kingston, 2013, Schaerf, 1999). Educational timetabling systems can vary according to the types of the institution involved, for example, the school-timetabling system is different from both universities and colleges timetabling systems, or it can be differentiated according to the type of the educational system involved, for example, the American educational system is different than the British system; the first is focused on the number of academic credits, while the British system is based mainly on modules and subjects.

Moreover, University’s timetabling can be further divided into class-timetabling and examination- timetabling; to some extent, each has its individual process and difficulties, our main focus will be focused on University’s Course Timetabling Problem (UCTP) (Sarin et al., 2010). When an institution offers a specific course, the course is broken down into sections, where each has a set of constraints, the details of the course, modules involved, and the time associated with each module, suitability, and availability of each room, a number of students and lecturers, some of these constraints are considered Hard Constraints (HC), and another is considered Soft Constraint (SC).

However, conflicts could appear either when a single resource (student, a room, teacher, and student) takes a place in different events at the same time, or problem associated to lack of resources or time, such as the capacity of rooms or difficulties for the event to occur at specific working days such as bank holidays, moreover, some modules require the previous qualification such as a previous module to be taken, as a problem could occur when a student selects a particular section (Abuhamdah et al., 2013)