A CONSTRAINT BASED ALGORITHM FOR AN AUTOMATED CLASS TIMETABLING SYSTEM FOR A HIGH SCHOOL IN UGANDA

A well thought out class timetable is of paramount significance in sustaining a good pedagogical experience for both teachers and students. As such, a powerful algorithm is required in automating the intricate process of timetable generation to ensure that a good solution that fulfils all the hard constraints produced. This process is exacerbated by the fact that each school has its own unique set of constraints including number of lessons a particular teacher can have a week, number of lessons for a particular subject per week, number of periods per day, duration of periods, number of streams per class. Manually generating a timetable that fulfils all constraints is not only painstakingly slow and cumbersome, but also prone to errors and omissions. Despite these encumbrances, all high schools in Uganda still use this traditional method of timetable generation without any information system support.

This paper presents an algorithm for generating a class timetable that guarantees the fulfillment of all hard constraints thereby ensuring a good and feasible solution whenever it is implemented and executed. With a case study of Gayaza High School, one of the oldest secondary schools in Uganda, the paper presents an analysis of the school’s requirements to determine the pertinent soft and hard constraints, the algorithm in pseudocode form and the results achieved on implementation of the algorithm. The satisfaction of all hard constraints by the algorithm is computationally intensive. The paper suggests ways of improving the effectiveness of the presented algorithm.