Automated Course Timetabling in a Multiagent System

Thiri Haymar Kyaw, Ni Lar Thein

University of Computer Studies, Yangon, Myanmar.
thirihaymarkyaw@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
Academic course timetabling is a large, complex and time-consuming process. The course timetabling
process consists of scheduling a sequence of lectures between teachers and classrooms to a number of
time-slots, satisfying a set of constraints. Our multiagent system intends to support some workflows of the
university and provide automated tasks such as timetabling. Its architecture includes Coordinators and
composite agents. Course scheduling is accomplished through Coordinators and using a mobile agent
called mobile inference engine. In this paper, we present a timetabling approach used in our multiagent
system architecture. This approach can successfully generate an effective and efficient solution to the
timetabling problem.

Keywords: Course Timetabling, Hard and Soft Constraints, Coordinator Agents.

1. Introduction should be satisfied for better model. Since

Multiagent system technology has become a
popular paradigm for designing, modeling and
implementing software solutions. In our
Multiagent University architecture, Intelligent
Coordinator agent (ICo) communicates and
coordinates between composite agents using
token-based approach. A composite agent is
composed of individual agents or agent teams.
For example, DeptAgent is composed of seven
faculties or department agent teams which
include individual teacher agents.
Communication, coordination and negotiation
among individual agents are the duties of
Assistant Coordinator agent (ACo). Coordinator
agents use Mobile Inference Engine (MIE) to
determine token movement decisions and to
compute the required functions. MIE has
mobility property which can move to every site
and embedded many rule based functions to be
done automated tasks and decisions.
Course scheduling is a coordination problem
to find an appropriate timetable for each course
and class while avoiding hard and soft
constraints. To ensure feasibility of the model,
hard constraints must be satisfied and cannot be
violated. Soft constraints may be violated but
timetabling approaches differ from one
university to another based on the type of
constraints, we concentrated on generating
appropriate timetable for our University of
Computer Studies.
The manual solution of timetabling problem
is a complex and time consuming work. In our
multiagent system, when a composite agent
called AdminAgent wants to schedule a course
timetable, it creates a token with task
information and sends it to ICo. After collecting
required information and selecting appropriate
composite agent which is DeptAgent, ICo
passes the token to it. ACo in DeptAgent
generates a course timetable after performing
three-step process with the help of MIE. The
timetabling constraints are satisfied by rules
which embedded in MIE. MIE can move to
negotiate among agents in different
departments.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows:
Some of the existing timetabling approaches are
reviewed in section 2. Section 3 introduces the
problems and constraints of our timetabling
model. We describe the proposed timetabling
model in section 4 and show the preliminary

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results in section 5. We draw conclusion with
our future direction in the last section, section 6.
2. Related Work
Many research papers related to course
scheduling or timetabling have been published
in the literature and applications have been
developed to generate automated timetables. M.
Oprea [2] presented the university course
timetable scheduling as a multiagent system.
The university includes five faculties and each
has a scheduler multiagent system which has to
schedule the courses of that faculty. The main
scheduler agent, the university scheduler agent
will allocate the rooms. Each faculty level
Multiagent System includes a faculty scheduler
agent and expert assistants (EA) for each
specialized courses of that faculty.
Y. Yang, et al. proposed agent based
mechanisms for solving the course scheduling
problem [3, 5]. In their first agent model, each
mobile agent represents a course named Course
agent that negotiates with each other through a
Signboard Agent for each day of the week.
Their general solution model includes CHC
Agent which represents the Common Hard
Constraints, HC Agents which represent other
additional Hard Constraints and SC Agents
which represent the Soft Constraints in the
course timetabling problem. This model is
designed in three different modes: the passive
mode, the active mode and the parallel-active
mode to overcome two key difficulties:
application-specific issues and dynamic-
constraint issues.
An academic course scheduling system
using IAEDS (Intelligent Agent Enabled
Decision Support) system is proposed in [4]. It
uses software agents that utilize the course
schedule information of previous terms, the
estimated number of students for every course,
availability of classrooms and different
instructors’ teaching interests, to develop a pre-
assignment of courses to instructors. A mobile
scheduling agent requests every instructor to
respond to this pre-assignment of courses. The
final course schedule is determined by resolving
conflicts which rose after assimilating the
instructors’ responses. In [8], a UML
2
application for course scheduling system is
designed and implemented. It emphasizes a
constraint-based interactive decision making
process.
3. Problems and Constraints
The timetabling problems can be classified
into three main classes: school timetabling,
course timetabling and examination timetabling
[1]. School timetabling consists of scheduling
for all classes in a school, avoiding teachers
meeting two classes at the same time. Course
timetabling consists in scheduling all lectures to
a set of university courses, minimizing the
overlaps of lectures of courses having common
students. Examination timetabling is the
scheduling for the exams of a set of university
courses’ exams that have common students and
distributing the exams for the students as much
as possible.
In our university, course timetabling is very
similar to school timetabling. Our goal is to find
an academic year timetable for five-year master
degree programs of computer science and
computer technology. We assume that each
class may take a number of lectures with a set of
specific teachers or some specific subjects. In
addition, a teacher may teach different subjects
and different teachers may teach the same
subject.
The following hard constraints must be
satisfied to get the better feasible course
timetable according to our university’s nature.
- Each class has its own classroom and no
classroom assignments are made.
- All classes have fixed time-slots that are time
intervals of a day in which courses can be
assigned. Currently, there are 4 time-slots in
a day from 8:00 am to 3:35 pm including
lunch time for all week days from Monday to
Friday.
- The courses listed in the lecture plan of each
class must be considered.
- Each teacher is pre-assigned to certain
courses and classes.
- A teacher cannot be assigned more than one
class at the same time interval.
- Each teacher must be assigned at most three
time-slots per day for all days.
- Some courses consist of two lecture times
and a tutorial time in a week. Some courses
consist of two lecture times in a week and a
tutorial time per two weeks.
- Some classes have a lab time in a week.
Tutorial times should be at the end of the day
and lab times should not be at the beginning
of the day.
These are handled in the second step of our
three-step process.
During the negotiation process, possible soft
constraints are resolved to satisfy the course
timetable. The soft constraints we try to satisfy
as much as possible are:
- Some teachers prefer certain time-slots or
days for teaching.
- The time-slots assigned to a course should be
spread over week days.
- There should be at least one time-slot break
between two lectures of a teacher.
- The preferences of the teachers related to
courses must be satisfied.
4. The Proposed Course Timetabling
Model
4.1. Multiagent Architecture
Multiagent architecture in this proposed
approach consists of Intelligent Coordinator
agent (ICo) and composite agents such as
AdminAgent which represents administration
department, StuAffairAgent which represents
student affair department or DeptAgent
represents all departments in the university. A
composite agent is composed of several
individual agents. ICo takes the duty of
coordination and communication between
composite agents. Assistant Coordinator agent
(ACo) provides the internal communication
between individual agents within the same
composite agent. Agent communication is
performed by passing tokens which encapsulate
control and information for message informing,
task allocation and resource sharing and so on.
The general architecture for timetabling is
described in Fig.1. The composite agents have
related databases to access for required
information. In this architecture, DeptAgent is
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composed of seven department teams which
include several teacher agents.
Fig.1. The general architecture of course
timetabling module.
When Intelligent Coordinator agent (ICo)
receives a task token to draw a course timetable
before starting next academic year, ICo
decomposes timetabling according to courses,
i.e. first year course, second year course, etc.
And then ICo creates and sends request tokens
to AdminAgent and StuAffairAgent for asking
information about classrooms and students.
After collecting information, ICo sends task
token to Assistant Coordinator agent (ACo) in
DeptAgent for assigning each course to teacher
agents.
The task token includes the number of
classrooms for specific class name such as first
year class or second year class, the number of
courses that are assigned to such class and the
number of teachers who will be assigned to
courses. The same subjects are assigned to
different teachers according to the number of
classrooms for the same class name and
different courses are assigned to the same
teachers according to the teachers’ preferences.
4.2. Three-Step Process for Timetabling
In the architecture of Fig. 1, ACo performs
as a three-step process to reach the final
satisfied timetable. These three steps are Course
Assignment to Teachers, Allocation Initial
Timetable and Negotiation.
As the first step of the timetabling, ACo
selects appropriate agents to send the task
assignment token for each course according to
the Matching function in MIE. The Matching
function matches the teachers whose degrees
and departments are related to the courses.
Databases consisting TeachersProfiles and
Courses are handled by DeptAgent. A
TeachersProfiles table includes teachersID,
name, rank, dept, role, degree, Experience
(year), workload (times), prefer course1, prefer
course2, prefer course3, last-year course1, last-
year course2 and timetable for week days. A
Courses table includes courseID, paper no.,
description, dept, class name.
Then, ACo chooses the predefined number
of appropriate teacher agents to assign each
course according to the priority matrix in
working with MIE. The priority matrix includes
role, rank, degree, experience; prefer courses
and last year assigned courses for each teacher.
Role variable (Rl) is determined as integer
values 1 to 4 based on working year
experiences, best teaching experiences for
courses and qualified degrees. Rank of teachers
(Rn) may be professor, assistant professor,
lecturer, assistant lecturer or tutor and defined
as integer values. Degree (d) is the qualified
degree of teachers such as Ph.D, Ph.D(thesis),
M.C.Sc., M.C.Tech, etc. The highest role or
rank or degree is assigned with largest integer
value and the lower roles or ranks or degrees are
assigned with smaller values.
Experience (Expr) is expressed as integer
value according to the number of working years
that is worked as a teacher. While prefer course
1 is more prefer to teach than prefer course 2 or
3 and prefer course 1 is equal to current course
which will be assigned, prefer course (PrC) is
assigned to largest integer value. If the course
which will be assigned is equal to the course the
teacher took in last year, last year assigned
course (LaC) is 1. Otherwise, LaC is 0. Priority
Matrix P is as follows : P = [ Rl Rn d Expr
PrC LaC ].
T represents an available time to teach the
course. If a teacher has a free time to assign the
course and this course is not the currently
assigned course for this academic year, T is 1.
After extracting priority matrix P for each
teacher, MIE computes P′ = P Λ T. Otherwise,
T is 0. TeachersID (TID) and P′ matrices of all
teachers who accepted to teach the course are
putting together as a decreasing order as in Fig.
4
2 and pick up according to the descending order
to get the pre-defined number of teachers. Then,
the picked up teachers are assigned to this
course.
Fig. 2. A part of grouping together descending
ordered P′ matrices with teachersID.
In the second step, the courses, which were
assigned to teachers, are allocated to
classrooms’ time-slots during a week. Courses
are firstly assigned to master classes’ timetables
and then graduate classes and under graduate
classes, etc. We assume that the number of
classrooms of a class, the number of courses
which must be taken in this class and the
number of lecture and tutorial times for each
course are pre-defined after collecting
information by ICo.
The time-slots in a week are constructed as a
two dimensional matrix. For the first time
courses to classroom assignment, courses are
randomly assigned to time-slots. If it is not first
assignment for any teacher’s course, we must
check whether the time-slot is free in the
teacher’s timetable before allocating. The
allocating process is repeated until all time-slots
in a week are filled with courses. After
allocation a time-slot to a teacher, it must be
updated to the teacher’s timetable. The
preliminary allocated course timetable has not
fully completed to satisfy the teachers’
preferences.
The third step is negotiation process. If the
conflicts arise among teachers’ preferences,
negotiation needs to be resolved. ACo works as
a negotiator among the individual teachers in
different departments passing the negotiate
tokens. All rules and computing modules are
embedded in the Mobile Inference Engine
(MIE) and it can move to the location of the
databases or other sites to take the required data
for computations. The example negotiation rules
are as follows:
- When the two courses conflicts, the minor
course changes its time-slot.
- When the two teachers’ preference time-slot
or day conflicts, teachers with the lower P′
values or teachers with minimum workload
changes its time-slot or day.
- When the two teachers with the same rank or
same P value conflict about the time-slot or
day, one teacher with ongoing research or a
visited professor is given its preferences and
another teacher changes its time.
When no conflicts exist between the
teachers’ preferences, ACo generates the
timetable. After generating final timetable, ACo
replies the task token it received from ICo with
the course timetable forms. The timetable for all
courses is stored in DeptAgent. If any schedule
changes arise during the academic year, the
timetable must be updated immediately.
5. Preliminary Results
We consider there are 6 classrooms for first
year class. This class must take 7 courses
including minor subjects. Two teachers are
assigned for each course and each teacher is
assigned to 3 classrooms. These teachers may
take other courses for other classes. One lab
time is included in the time-slots of each
classroom. For this class, there is one lab room
which accommodating the students of two
classrooms. The initial timetable for 3
classrooms is shown in Fig. 3.
Agents in this model are created on the
JADE platform [12] and MySQL Server 5.0 is
used for databases. The initial timetable satisfies
the hard constraints but to become final
timetable fully satisfying the soft constraints it
must pass the negotiation process until reaching
the global agreement.
Fig. 3. A part of the initial timetable.
6. Conclusion
In this paper, a course timetabling approach
that is included in a multiagent system is
described. Our multiagent system architecture
includes coordinator agents (ICo and ACo) and
composite agents. Course timetabling module is
performed by ACo in the department composite
agent called DeptAgent. This module consists
of three steps: course assigning, timetable
allocating and negotiating. After negotiation
process, the final timetable is successfully
generated for coming academic year. We
believe that this agent-based approach is
promising to satisfy the constraints of course
timetabling problem and improving manual
paper-based scheduling. Although, currently we
focus on automated course timetabling for
University of Computer Studies, we will extend
to the general course timetabling model in the
future.
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