Periodic dynamic scheduling with application to academic course scheduling

To accomplish this task, an interactive computer simulation model was developed which captured most of the complexities of the general academic course schedule problem. The program was executed on data from The University of Tennessee/Knoxville MBA Program, and results and recommendations for course schedules are presented.

The general academic course scheduling problem also motivated a new class of scheduling problems. For a meaningful course schedule, it is usually the case that the same set of courses will be offered every fall, another set of courses every winter, and so on.

To be more precise, if S_k is the set of courses offered in period k, kε {0,1,2,...}, then there exists a positive integer n such that

S_k = S_[k]n

where [k]_n is k modulo n. Such a schedule is called a periodic schedule.

There are other situations in which periodic schedules are also applicable. In an industrial situation where jobs arrive on a periodic basis, restrictions to periodic schedules may be valid. The last part of this work deals with the relation of periodic scheduling to classical scheduling and with the development of optimal algorithms for some special cases of periodic scheduling problems.