UP Manila Course Timetabling System (UPM CTS)

Abstract

University course timetabling is a complex and tedious task which involves a lot of variables and constraints. In the University of the Philippines Manila, course timetabling is still being done manually every semester. Doing it this way takes a lot of time and personnel, and the resulting timetables are still not optimal. The UP Manila Course Timetabling System (UPM CTS) is a web application which automates the process of assigning rooms and timeslots to classes in the generation of timetables in UP Manila using a two-stage optimization algorithm consisting of iterative forward search algorithm, hill climbing algorithm, great deluge algorithm, and simulated annealing algorithm. The algorithm tries to find the most optimal timetable based on the constraints provided until a predetermined time limit is reached. If a complete timetable, where all classes are assigned to rooms and timeslots, cannot be found, a subset of classes with assigned rooms and timeslots is still returned.