Abstract:
A timetable is an organized list, usually set out in tabular form, providing information about a
series of arranged events: in particular, the time at which it is planned these events will take
place. Timetable creation is an important task in any educational institutes for each
semester/year. The activity involves creating a schedule for each class, assigning teacher, venue,
and time slot. During creation of a timetable for whole institute is a tough job, one has to make a
good number of combinations or class, teacher, venue and time slot and I its needs to make sure
none of these combinations conflict, mean each combination must not have any thing in common
with any other.
If this job is done on paper or spread sheet it is very difficult to detect any conflicts. It is very
common that concerned teachers, students report conflicts after the timetable is printed and
distributed. It is also observed that any change in timetable can disturb many other combinations
creating more undetected conflicts.
Once timetable is finalized it also requires analysis for many reports again and again. These
reports can be about total work load for teachers, utilization of venues etc. Such reporting makes
it difficult to manage updated timetable, because after updating a timetable will require manual
changes in all reports which can be affected by the change. Otherwise the reports become
outdated thus presenting wrong picture about utilization of resources.
Teachers, classes, venues are very important resources of an institute. Effective utilization of
these resources is very important. A good timetable must have good utilization of available
resources. In manual timetables we cannot view utilization from different angle with ease, like
utilization of venue etc.
