Class Construction and Student Allocation

Each year in every secondary school, days or even weeks are spent in constructing a school timetable. At present, this is done by senior staff (whose time could be better spent on something else) , since timetable construction requires knowledge, and authority to make decisions, that only they have. The aim of this research project was to investigate the problem of class construction and student allocation, and derive techniques which could be used to solve the problem. In order to be of practical value to schools wishing to make use of these techniques, they must be able to be implemented on a mini I micro-computer and take no more than 17 hours of computing time, so that it can be run overnight