Automatic Timetabling System for Universities and Colleges
Automatic Timetabling System for Universities and Colleges
Many of the university timetable systems in practice have focused more on the management aspect and less on the generating aspect of the timetabling problem. Although lately significant efforts have been made to bridge this gap, however the problem still persists in many universities, especially here in Nigeria. Systems that attempted to provide an automatic generation module are designed to work for schools that provide admissions on per session basis (which is common in Nigeria) rather than their counterparts that provide admission on per semester basis (as practice in Baze University). The “per session” admission implies that for every set of students in the university, the semester is constant at any particular time (i.e. all students will be in 1st semester at the same time and 2nd semester at the same time). However, the “per semester” admission is more complicated as it implies that only students admitted in a common semester will be in the same semester, therefore at a given period of time there are two categories of students since there are two semesters in a session – those in 1st semester and those in 2nd semester. The implication is that resources in the university are concurrently shared by these two categories of student, which makes the timetable more complicated than the “per session” based admission schools.
It is clear in the literature; there has been no successful system that integrates all these activities. In an attempt to solve this problem it is proposed that an information system that encompasses all these activities be developed, i.e. a system that provides modules for timetabling management and timetable generation for both “per session” and “per semester” based admission schools.
Today I present to you - TimeTABLER; the perfect solution to the problem, and its novelty is in its ability to be able to work for both “per session” and “per semester” based admission schools seamlessly.
By Sholanke Oluwatobi
Department of Computer Engineering
Faculty of Engineering
Baze University