Soft Scheduling

TL;DR

This paper explores soft constraint satisfaction approaches to scheduling, introducing soft disjunctive scheduling, and demonstrates practical applications in university timetabling with initial computational results.

Contribution

It introduces soft disjunctive scheduling as a new soft CSP variant and applies it to real-world timetabling problems, showcasing practical utility.

Findings

Soft disjunctive scheduling as a new soft CSP model

Application to university timetabling problems

Initial computational results demonstrate feasibility

Abstract

Classical notions of disjunctive and cumulative scheduling are studied from the point of view of soft constraint satisfaction. Soft disjunctive scheduling is introduced as an instance of soft CSP and preferences included in this problem are applied to generate a lower bound based on existing discrete capacity resource. Timetabling problems at Purdue University and Faculty of Informatics at Masaryk University considering individual course requirements of students demonstrate practical problems which are solved via proposed methods. Implementation of general preference constraint solver is discussed and first computational results for timetabling problem are presented.