Timetabling Lab Sessions at the Koningsberger Building

Abstract

Since 2015 the Victor J. Koningsberger building has been used by multiple departments and faculties of Utrecht University to host their lab sessions. To help with the scheduling of the lab sessions, we created an algorithm to automatically create a timetable based on the requests. In this work we describe how we modeled the problem. We also show our algorithm, which is a version of Simulated Annealing, and its components. Elaborate results are shown of our research to find the best settings for our algorithm. Finally, we also take a look at the GUI application that we created to allow course coordinators to fill in their demands and the central coordinator(s) to create a timetable from those demands, using our algorithm. Our method has already been used to create the timetables for the first two quarters of the 2017-2018 academic year, and it has been decided to use these timetables instead of the hand-made ones. More recently, it has been decided that our GUI application and algorithm will be used for the creation of the timetables for the third and fourth quarter of the 2017-2018 academic year as well.