Timetabling Algorithms?

Posted by Cliff on Monday June 24, 2002 @08:40AM from the code-that's-maintanable-by-someone-else dept.

Phil John queries: "I'm developing a system for a University Student Union which employs 400+ student staff. Allocating shifts up till now has been a manual task keeping 1 member of staff busy for at least a day. I've been asked to implement a Web/SQL based system to get student availability (which changes each week), get shifts required and automatically allocate shifts. Now, here's the problem: how do I handle the timetabling bit? Most solutions require genetic algorithms and while I can understand and implement them (having a degree in AI and CS) I'm not going to be around after the summer and this creates problems for people maintaining my code. Cheers for any help you guys (and gals) can give me!"

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Re:THe military Solution by RocketJeff · 2002-06-25 03:55 · Score: 3, Interesting

First, the Army way doesn't scale well to 400 people with many shifts, so I doubt if it'll work for this problem.
The reference on how to do Army duty rosters properly (i.e. without screwing people or pissing them off) is to follow the directions in AR 220-45 and to fill out DA Form 6.
As another former S1 (and later G1), this was the only way to do it. I saw command investigations where people were repremanded for not following the regs properly (or at all). In this case, the regulation does set out a fair way to rotate duty in a group.
I'm actually using this for scheduling Level 3 support in my development group and there've benn no complaints...