Comparative Study of Profiled School Scheduling Programs in Lithuania
Volume 4, Issue 1 (2005), pp. 19–42
Pub. online: 15 April 2005
Type: Article
Published
15 April 2005
15 April 2005
Abstract
Solution of the problem of optimal school scheduling is very important to make the
work of comprehensive schools more effective. Here the sequence of teaching subjects, regarded
as tools, can be changed. One needs to reduce the sum of gaps (“empty” hours) in the teacher
schedules. There should be no gaps for students. Different classes are considered as different tasks.
The classrooms, including the computer and physics rooms and studies, are the limited resources.
The most difficult example is scheduling of profiled school. Here eleventh and twelfth grade
students are choosing several subjects from the list of available ones. This means that each student
works by his own schedule. We search for the most convenient feasible schedule. The inconveniences
are evaluated by penalty points.
The purpose of the study is to analyze several commercial scheduling programs which are prevalent
in Lithuania at the moment and to compare them with existing timetable version of Optimization
Department of Lithuanian Institute of Mathematics and Informatics (IMI) from optimal
scheduling point of view. Therefore our research object is to study and compare the quality of
optimization algorithms of these programs.
One of the tasks is to identify existing commercial scheduling programs which might be right
for Lithuanian profiled comprehensive schools.
Another task is to perform the tentative comparison of scheduling programs MIMOSA, aSc
Timetables and IMI timetable version from the point of view of quality of optimal scheduling.
We used three stages for study of these programs:
1) scheduling without any confines – it’s allowable to consecutively add two equal subjects,
the ultimate number of lessons per day is 10 and teachers are working without day offs;
2) reduction of ultimate number of lessons to 9 lessons per day;
3) optimal scheduling of real Vilnius secondary school.