Timetabling software...why?

[titch]

Was having a chat with our MIS team about this and wondered why more of the MISs haven't implemented their own timetable manipulation offering. It "seems" like it wouldn't be something that hard to create and everyone needs it doesn't want to buy third party software. They are essentially leaving themselves wide open by relying on a separate company to enable this part of the system.

 

Then we wondered, as almost everyone uses timetabler why have none of the big MISs not just bought timetabler and incorporated it into their own setup. Not that I'm condoning it but it would be a major blow for competitors MISs basically left with no way other than manually for other MISs to sort timetables. It is business after all?

[mavhc]

It's a very hard computer science problem to start with. Multiple constraints, class size must not be larger than room size, each teacher might not be available for every lesson, each subject is possibly constrained to a subset of rooms (Science, Food Tech), each subject might be split by level, so each student is in multiple classes, then you have options, so everyone's split again. Also don't schedule consecutive classes at opposite ends of the school if the school is large. Try to group all the English classes into one area of the school so you're not carrying 30 textbooks back and forth, don't put all the Maths lessons for a class on the same day, etc etc etc.

 

Does your school have 1 lunch period, or multiple, are some students working while others are eating? Does your external PE lesson at the local leisure centre require you to use a specific time slot?

 

If you want to test your timetabling software, here's some standard datasets that are hard to solve Timetabling https://www.utwente.nl/en/eemcs/dmmp/hstt/

 

https://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/ is the main open source solution

 

There's also a more generic planning software that can be used for timetables https://www.optaplanner.org/learn/useCases/schoolTimetabling.html

[titch]

Thanks for all the info. I don't disagree but you'd think it would be bread and butter for a large MIS company?

 

And if it's not why haven't they tried to buy someone to incorporate it into their systems?

[slugshead]

Where I work (not long started), turns out that commissioned an external company to design a powerapp for this, teachers fill out the powerapp during the admissions interviews and it all filters through, pretty neat.

[titch]

Where I work (not long started), turns out that commissioned an external company to design a powerapp for this, teachers fill out the powerapp during the admissions interviews and it all filters through, pretty neat.

That's cool. Does it do the jiggery pokery as well or just the sign up?

[slugshead]

That's cool. Does it do the jiggery pokery as well or just the sign up?

 

Just the jiggery pokery detecting clashes and whatnot