Automated Large-scale Class Scheduling in MiniZinc

TL;DR

This paper presents an efficient MiniZinc-based system for large-scale class scheduling that generates balanced, constraint-satisfying schedules quickly for educational institutions.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible, constraint-based scheduling model implemented in MiniZinc capable of producing balanced schedules efficiently.

Findings

Schedules generated in less than a minute for moderate-sized institutes

The system satisfies all constraints including student, teacher, and room availability

Flexible for fixed-credit and open-credit systems

Abstract

Class Scheduling is a highly constrained task. Educational institutes spend a lot of resources, in the form of time and manual computation, to find a satisficing schedule that fulfills all the requirements. A satisficing class schedule accommodates all the students to all their desired courses at convenient timing. The scheduler also needs to take into account the availability of course teachers on the given slots. With the added limitation of available classrooms, the number of solutions satisfying all constraints in this huge search-space, further decreases. This paper proposes an efficient system to generate class schedules that can fulfill every possible need of a typical university. Though it is primarily a fixed-credit scheduler, it can be adjusted for open-credit systems as well. The model is designed in MiniZinc and solved using various off-the-shelf solvers. The proposed scheduling system can find a balanced schedule for a moderate-sized educational institute in less than a minute.