Re: timetabling for Universities

[Florian Kulzer <florian@molphys.leidenuniv.nl>]

Hi again,

First of all I want to thank Stephan, Tim and Alexander for their suggestions.
At least I can now be relatively certain that I did not miss some obvious
existing solution for my specific timetabling problem.

I have come up with two more options:

1) It may be possible to bend a groupware application into something which
vaguely fits my needs. I could divide the students into teams according to their
semester and then use the groupware server to schedule lectures as appointments
for the various teams, with the lecture halls as resources. Both opengroupware
and egroupware seem to be able to handle this, including detection of scheduling
and resource conflicts.

2) I have also played around a bit with PostgreSQL and come up with a first
crude version of a database which will fit my requirements. I will now probably
just write some bash-wrappers so that the user does not need to know SQL in
order to schedule lectures and retrieve timetables. This will not be as pretty
as the GUIs of option 1, but it is of course much more flexible (and I can use
perl + latex to produce nice PDF-timetables directly from the info in the
database).

Please let me know if anybody has additional ideas.

Regards,
           Florian