The Development of SYLLABUS--An Interactive, Constraint-Based Scheduler for Schools and Colleges
Rick Evertsz · 1991
In most schools and colleges, producing a timetable is a task that is dreaded by those charged with annually creating it. In schools in par-ticular, it can be difficult to produce any solution at all because teach-ing resources are usually stretched to the limit. This situation is made more difficult by the fact that the person making up the timetable must not only produce a valid solution but one that is of good quality. A large number of judgmental factors are involved in producing a good-quality timetable. Some of these are educational (for example, it is undesirable for a group of pupils to have a Spanish lesson immediately following a German one), others pertain to the work conditions of the staff (for example, the teaching load should be distributed evenly through the day so that no teacher has a long, contiguous block of lessons), and others are political (for example, a senior teacher should not end up with fewer free periods than a more junior one). These qual-itative factors make an already difficult problem time consuming indeed.