Talk:School timetable/Archive 1

From Tcotco
The majority of the text of this article was written by me, Dr Tim Cooper, tco@edval.com.au. As noted in the article, this material applies mainly to the systems used in European countries and Australia.
 * Then why are using these kinds of quotation marks: « » ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.52.252.93 (talk) 11:08, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

My original article had a selection of external links to software companies, in addition to the Google directory and the PATAT conferences. Predictably, the list of software programs invited wikispam (one Indian guy made a clumsy attempt to delete everyone else's links and add his own). I've now inserted just 3 external links: 1 to the academic community, and 2 to directories of commercial software. The web sites of the various commercial software companies are useful sources for verifying the material in the article. Note: I'm a novice at Wikipedia.

I'd welcome further discussion on the details of the article. Tcotco 03:45, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Are your readers expected to understand 1500s, [50]s, 20s, Period8 (also called periods)? 31.52.252.93 (talk) 11:12, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

refimprove ? I'd love to put in more inline citations but most of the online information is on the websites of commercial software companies. Once we link to one of these pages, it's an invitation for about 80 other companies to stick their links in here. I could link to gov't sites with curriculum requirements, but it's heavy going to go from those documents to implications for timetabling.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Tcotco (talk • contribs) 14:14, 9 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I've expanded descriptions in the terminology section for those terms I use regularly. Haven't heard yet of a "student body", "band" or "elective line". From my experience terminology is so different between regions that it's impractical to describe all meanings for all terms. Avian 02:45, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Peatar, I moved the list of open source projects to the (newly created and so far pretty empty) University timetable page. The reason was that I've never heard of a school using open source software to do timetabling. Admittedly, my experience is mainly from Australia. Do you know of any school (not university) that uses open-source software? Tcotco (talk) 11:43, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

200.108.109.164, please create a wikipedia account so you can sign your edits. I put your text under a heading "Elective Lines", although maybe the last 2 paragraphs need their own heading. I also removed the statement that "most programs are not suitable for large schools" - I simply don't think that's true unless you mean a large number of obscure programs are suitable only for small schools. If you mean that most programs are not up to the challenge of the more difficult large schools, then my experience suggests that when timetabling large schools you often have more flexibility than small schools so there's not a clear correlation between size of school and difficulty. Tcotco (talk) 22:13, 18 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Please 8A is not understood outside of Australia. May be a section is needed to describe student body names and labeling in various countries. Cheers. --Connection (talk) 20:05, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

I removed this text: In Indian context school time table is of four types- a)General Time table -it includes general information of the proceedings; b)Time table for teachers where they can see their allotted classes throughout the week; c)A time table for students to manage themselves accordingly & d)Provisional time table - It keeps record of the absentee teachers and make shift arrangements for that.

Firstly I didn't understand what is "general information of the proceedings". Secondly, (b) and (c) sound like 2 different views of a timetable once constructed - these views obviously exist in all countries, and (d) is also an issue in all countries. What you'd really need to explain in this section if you want to discuss India is whether it's a "students remain in the classroom and teachers rotate" system, or a "everything runs in blocks aka lines" system, or a complex system like what the bulk of the article is about.

Free (libre) timetabling software and a successful practical algorithm

 * Does what follows *really* belong in Talk:School timetable? 31.52.252.93 (talk) 12:56, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

A practical, fast and efficient heuristic for timetabling problems, may be possible to apply it to other NP-complete problems

I am author of a free software, named FET - free software - open source - for school, high-school and university timetabling. The page is: http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/

The program is applied with success in many institutions.

Note: by solving, I mean heuristically solving practical cases, like FET does. I do not claim to solve NP-complete problems polynomially.

Maybe you are interested into spreading the word about this method.

The description of the algorithm:

The algorithm is heuristic.

Input: a set of activities A_1...A_n and the constraints.

Output: a set of times TA_1...TA_n (the time slot of each activity. Rooms are excluded here, for simplicity). The algorithm must put each activity at a time slot, respecting constraints. Each TA_i is between 0 (T_1) and max_time_slots-1 (T_m).

Constraints:

C1) Basic: a list of pairs of activities which cannot be simultaneous (for instance, A_1 and A_2, because they have the same teacher or the same students);

C2) Lots of other constraints (excluded here, for simplicity).

The timetabling algorithm (which I named "recursive swapping"):

1) Sort activities, most difficult first. Not critical step, but speeds up the algorithm maybe 10 times or more.

2) Try to place each activity (A_i) in an allowed time slot, following the above order, one at a time. Search for an available slot (T_j) for A_i, in which this activity can be placed respecting the constraints. If more slots are available, choose a random one. If none is available, do recursive swapping:

2 a) For each time slot T_j, consider what happens if you put A_i into T_j. There will be a list of other activities which don't agree with this move (for instance, activity A_k is on the same slot T_j and has the same teacher or same students as A_i). Keep a list of conflicting activities for each time slot T_j.

2 b) Choose a slot (T_j) with lowest number of conflicting activities. Say the list of activities in this slot contains 3 activities: A_p, A_q, A_r.

2 c) Place A_i at T_j and make A_p, A_q, A_r unallocated.

2 d) Recursively try to place A_p, A_q, A_r (if the level of recursion is not too large, say 14, and if the total number of recursive calls counted since step 2) on A_i began is not too large, say 2*n), as in step 2).

2 e) If successfully placed A_p, A_q, A_r, return with success, otherwise try other time slots (go to step 2 b) and choose the next best time slot).

2 f) If all (or a reasonable number of) time slots were tried unsuccessfully, return without success.

2 g) If we are at level 0, and we had no success in placing A_i, place it like in steps 2 b) and 2 c), but without recursion. We have now 3 - 1 = 2 more activities to place. Go to step 2) (some methods to avoid cycling are used here).

Links:

FET: http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/

Lalesculiviu (talk) 19:16, 4 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Congrats for your elegant software. I see you are using C++ code. Did you consider Prolog? Did you try AmziLogic compiler with .Net? If yes, does it integrate as desired? Cheers.--Connection (talk) 20:02, 14 December 2013 (UTC)


 * I only considered C++, because it is the fastest and because I do not know other languages. But the program has a command-line interface and might be used from other interface.
 * Lalesculiviu (talk) 11:01, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

tone
this entire article has a weird tone. there are some small obvious things, such as using "us" (when writing an encyclopedic article, imagine you are like god. an objective viewer who is outside of it), but it seems strangely inobjective and unencyclopedic. imma fix some small things (chiefly the "us" issue), but i dunno how far i'll be able to resolve it. Farleigheditor (talk) 17:33, 22 September 2020 (UTC) just to add, one of the major factors for the pages weird tone is that it's almost written like a manual as to how to create a school timetable. wikipedia is not a manual website, it's an encyclopedia, and should be written as such. Farleigheditor (talk) 17:44, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

introduction
this page does not have a proper introduction, it just jumps straight into it. this doesn't fit with the wikipedia manual of style. I do not know enough about timetables to do so, so if someone else knowledgeable want's to write/start an intro, that'd be great. Farleigheditor (talk) 17:42, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

Abbreviations
The abbreviations section needs some work. It explains MW as being an abbreviation for Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. In my experience (I know, I am not a reference) MW means Mondays and Wednesdays. The abbreviation for Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays that I am familiar with is MWF. It mentions versions with hyphens, but goes on to describe them as confusing. This confusion is magnified by the aforementioned MW vs MWF problem. And, again, this does not match my experience, where hyphens are only used for ranges (M-F meaning Monday through Friday, for example). It also doesn't mention a variation that I have encountered that uses R for Thursday. I can't access the sources used for this, so I don't know if this is even an accurate representation of them, but it definitely does not match my experiences as a student and as an educator. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 02:05, 12 February 2022 (UTC)