Students spend so much time meeting with advisors, fitting the right courses into their schedule and choosing the best professors - just to have to do it all again when the wrong course fills too soon. There’s a lot of room for improvement in the process, and on this site, we’ll show some of our ideas.
We determined that a simulated annealing algorithm can be effective for scheduling students into classes in a way that optimizes for the whole community, rather than for specific students. There are significant barriers to overcome before our system can be implemented at the university level, but it is evident that there are benefits to a computer aided approach. We recommend that universities continue to research different approaches to scheduling students whether this is our algorithm or other innovative models.