1.1 Problem Statment

With hundreds of classes being offered each quarter, Cal Poly administrators spend many hours creating schedules that accommodate for professors preferences, while ensuring that classes fall under university time constraints. The objective of the scheduler project is to build a software tool to help academic departments with course scheduling. Some of the features we envision for the tool are the following:

• an easy-to-use database of instructor information, which includes course teaching preferences and teaching time preferences
• an easy-to-use database of a department's course offerings, including courses planned for particular quarters
• the ability to define department-specific scheduling constraints to guide the scheduling process
• a sophisticated scheduling algorithm that generates an optimized schedule, based on instructor preferences, planned course offerings, and departmental constraints
• the ability to fine tune a generated schedule, with automated checking to ensure schedule completeness and consistency

We envision the tool being used at the department level, by the same people who normally perform department scheduling now. The result of a scheduling session will be in a form suitable for electronic submission to the campus scheduling database. Qualitatively, we seek to generate a schedule that is complete, consistent with faculty preferences, consistent with departmental constraints, and fair to a department's faculty overall.