school-timetabling's Introduction

School Timetabling

A minimal OptaPlanner project to solve a school timetabling problem

Problem description

School timetabling is an NP-hard problem. It is difficult to scale. AI constraint solvers such as OptaPlanner have advanced algorithms that deliver a near-optimal solution in a reasonable amount of time.

Define constraints

The solver will assign Lesson instances to Timeslot and Room instances automatically by using AI to adhere to the following hard and soft constraints.

A room can have at most one lesson at the same time.
A teacher can teach at most one lesson at the same time.
A student can attend at most one lesson at the same time.
A teacher prefers to teach every lesson in a single room.
A teacher prefers to teach sequential lessons and dislikes gaps between lessons.

The constraints are implemented in the Drools score file.

Load the problem

All lessons, timeslots and rooms from the above screenshot are specified in the App file.

Solve for a solution

Make sure you have Gradle on your computer and run:

$ ./gradlew run
Solved TimeTable with 5 timeslots, 3 rooms and 10 lessons:

* Geography(1) -> Room A, MONDAY 09:30
* Physics(2) -> Room A, MONDAY 08:30
* Physics(3) -> Room A, MONDAY 13:30
* Chemistry(4) -> Room A, MONDAY 10:30
* Math(5) -> Room C, MONDAY 14:30
* Math(6) -> Room C, MONDAY 10:30
* Spanish(7) -> Room B, MONDAY 08:30
* Spanish(8) -> Room B, MONDAY 13:30
* English(9) -> Room B, MONDAY 09:30
* English(10) -> Room B, MONDAY 14:30

Score: 0hard/-6soft

Increase the time limit in the solver config file to get a better result.

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