Design And Implementation Of An Automated University Timetabling System

With rapid development of network techniques and continuing dissemination of educational information, information for educational administration at colleges and universities have become important marks showing different levels for administering education and running schools at universities. In daily work of educational administration, courses scheduling is the most important and essential link in carrying out comprehensive teaching plans in colleges and universities. However, as a result of preponderance of students, relative insufficiency of teachers and short of classrooms and other resources, courses scheduling through manual operation turned out to be very complicated and need much heavy labor from administrators. Especially, in courses scheduling through hand labor, administrators have to do much more work to avoid all kinds of conflicts. At present, systems for courses scheduling at colleges and universities in our country are limited by current conditions. Usually, they are used on very a small scale. Data sharing and spreading are still carried out at low levels. Therefore, opening up automatic systems for courses scheduling, which are suitable for own practices and conditions and solving problems in the routine work of courses scheduling have become the urgent task for educational administration. With the background of knowledge economy, they have naturally become the tide of development in message processing of educational administration at universities.This dissertation analyzed the background and present situation of the work in developing systems for courses scheduling. It also gave detailed accounts of its major work and present situation in general. According to practical requirements of the College of Biochemical Engineering, Beijing Union University, the dissertation analyzed key elements and restricting conditions and put forward difficult points and objective in the problems of course disposition. Following methods of designing in developing the software engineering, the dissertation analyzed the requirements, devised their functions and set up business models. It also gave an analysis of calculation of multi-courses scheduling, put forward a method based on combination of “Greedy Algorithm and Back-track Algorithm” and gave the detailed design and database design. It adopted the structure with three layers of data processing based on the Client / Server mode, chose to use Power Builder 12.5 and SQL Server 2000 and programmed to realize automatic courses scheduling function. Thus, the problems in courses scheduling at the college could be solved, the level of satisfaction with the result of courses scheduling could be well tested and feasibility and functions of the systems could be demonstrated clearly. The experiment showed that the system could greatly raise efficiency of courses scheduling at the college, effectively solve problems in courses scheduling with regard to difficult and complicated requirements. The functions in courses scheduling automatically are enlarged with re-opening of the ZHENG FANG information systems of educational administration at the college. It turned out to be really practical in application.