Constraint satisfaction problem: a teacher, room and course assignment optimization

This paper presented a solution in automating the course timetabling and staff/teacher allocation of College of Computer Science of Cebu Institute of Technology ? University. The current manual construction of timetable of the said department, which takes several days or months, is very tedious and arduous. Automating this process will significally reduce the time and effort consumption in creating the semester?s timetable.
The approach used in implementing the system is Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP) and the process is divided into three phases. The first phase assigns teachers to courses and satisfying their preferred subjects to be taught. Optimization on teacher?s loads was also made in order to cater the specific needs of the department. The second phase assigns the laboratory session to times and rooms. Given the result of the second phase, constraints and domains were updated to execute the third phase which includes assigning lecture classes to available time and rooms. All of the said phases used the heuristic Fail-First (FPP), AC-4 and NC-1 consistency achieving algorithms and the Full Look Ahead search algorithm in finding the complete solution (schedule of allocation).
One way to improve this system is to respect and satisfy the time and room preferences of teacher sand sections in generating the complete schedule. Also, assigning laboratory sessions to laboratory rooms that has the software needed for the subject is a good way to improve the system. Ensuring that there will be no four and above consecutive lectures hours for every teacher will be a very good aspect in increasing the efficiency of teachers using the system. In the interface part, it is more advisable to let the user input only minimal amount of data and automatically generating all the other data. Retrieving all the possible solutions and allowing the user to choose among them is also a good improvement to the system.

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