[schooltool] timetable optimization module?

[Jurgis Pralgauskis]

Hello,

Is there anything done in SchoolTool towards this? there's always a
puzzle to make up timetable...
I think the need emerges together with the wish/need to make
curriculum more flexible.
What do You and your known school administrators think? Is there a
need for it in SchoolTool?


ps.:
I am from Lithuania, bachelour of applied math,
We had "Mathematical programming (optimization)" by cool old proffesor
Jonas Mockus
http://mockus.org/optimum/ (the root site seem to belong to his son or so)

He develops the idea of school scedule optimization (using Bayesian
heuristics) for more than five years..
now there is kind of clumsy implementation in java, done bys students
over years, but it lacks nice UI
and might also lack functionality.
integration with ST and probable rewrite in python might do some good :)
latest papers on it I found http://itc.ktu.lt/itc342/Pupelie342.pdf
http://www.vtex.lt/informatica/htm/INFO355.htm


Best regards

[Tom Hoffman]

Post by Jurgis Pralgauskis
Hello,
Is there anything done in SchoolTool towards this? there's always a
puzzle to make up timetable...
I think the need emerges together with the wish/need to make
curriculum more flexible.
What do You and your known school administrators think? Is there a
need for it in SchoolTool?

Hi Jurgis,

Yes, there is a need for it, but we're focusing on finishing up some
more basic functionality first. The next step will be to see if we
can do what we need to do by interfacing with another actively
maintained open source timetabling application, like Tablix.

--Tom

Post by Jurgis Pralgauskis
I am from Lithuania, bachelour of applied math,
We had "Mathematical programming (optimization)" by cool old proffesor
Jonas Mockus
http://mockus.org/optimum/ (the root site seem to belong to his son or so)
He develops the idea of school scedule optimization (using Bayesian
heuristics) for more than five years..
now there is kind of clumsy implementation in java, done bys students
over years, but it lacks nice UI
and might also lack functionality.
integration with ST and probable rewrite in python might do some good :)
latest papers on it I found http://itc.ktu.lt/itc342/Pupelie342.pdf
http://www.vtex.lt/informatica/htm/INFO355.htm
Best regards
--
Jurgis Pralgauskis
Don't worry, be happy :) and make things better ;)
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[Ignas Mikalajunas]

Post by Tom Hoffman

Post by Jurgis Pralgauskis
Hello,
Is there anything done in SchoolTool towards this? there's always a
puzzle to make up timetable...
I think the need emerges together with the wish/need to make
curriculum more flexible.
What do You and your known school administrators think? Is there a
need for it in SchoolTool?

Hi Jurgis,
Yes, there is a need for it, but we're focusing on finishing up some
more basic functionality first. The next step will be to see if we
can do what we need to do by interfacing with another actively
maintained open source timetabling application, like Tablix.

If you would like to add such a module to schooltool yourself I
could help you with introduction to schooltool code and concepts. But
it would make more sense to do it as a separate python application
(long running processing task is not something you'd want to run on a
web server) and we would gladly support your file format. The fact
that it would be in python would make it possible to share the file
format "reading" code among both applications which makes it easier to
support.

As Tom said - we just don't have the resources to develop a good
timetable generation application from scratch ourselces. On the other
hand I could help you reuse our object model for sections, courses,
students and teachers so you could focus on constraint management and
timetable generation algorithms. It might be easier to just import
this data from schooltool instead of writing your own code to deal
with data input.

Ignas