Declarative configuration applied to course scheduling

Abstract

This thesis describes a course scheduling system that models planning as a satisfiability problem in relational logic. Given a set of course requirements for a degree program, our system can find a schedule of courses that will complete these requirements. It supports a flexible XML format for expressing course requirements and also handles additional user-specific constraints, such as requirements that certain courses be taken at particular times. Various optimizations were included in the translation to relational logic to improve the performance of our system and the quality of its results. We ran experiments on our system using degree programs from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT as input, and found that our approach is competitive with conventional planners.