DEVELOPMENT OF AN AUTOMATED SCHEDULING SYSTEM FOR UNIVERSITIES
The article reveals the development of an automated system for scheduling lessons as exemplified by NCHTI. It starts with review of the relevance of automated scheduling of university classes on high quality level and the necessity to take into account the characteristics of educational institutions and their specific requirements. The paper describes the problems of automating the activity of a higher educational institution, which basically is in not knowing what to begin with. The article goes on with the need for a "pre-project institution analysis" for the university, which includes building a comprehensive organizational model describing not only the interaction of structural units, but also information flows, functions, and operations performed by these structures. It also shows the advantages of automation itself, including reducing economic costs and number of errors, eliminating redundant operations, acceleration the dispatcher’s work. The limitations and requirements for the schedule are considered, which are divided into "soft" and "hard". The "hard" restrictions are mandatory, the "soft" ones are desirable but not mandatory. These include the comfort of learning conditions. The article also provides a method for solving the problem using the coefficients of subjects’ difficulty and students’ fatigue. Scheduling in accordance with the above criteria, as well as with established hygiene standards will allow you to correctly distribute the load to students during a week, month, the entire semester and, if possible, every day load. The article goes on with the automated system’s functionalities to schedule classes of an educational institution. The system has two access modes: administrator access and user access. This system has three scheduling modes: automatic, manual or combined mode. You can switch between the modes at any time. In conclusion, article shows the results of this research and some dialog boxes which the training department dispatcher will use in his work.