Conceptual model of compiling academic schedule at higher education institution

The relevance of the problem of automatic compilation of the academic schedule at higher education institution is determined by the fact that the quality requirements of the educational process are increasing on the part of all its participants, and modern software often cannot take into account all the features of the educational institution or can compile schedules in the automatic mode that are optimal only by one of the criteria. The purpose of the study is to formulate a conceptual model in verbal form of the problem of compiling an academic schedule at higher education institution and compare it with some models of other authors. Mandatory (hard) constraints that are highlighted in the problem must be guaranteed to be met. Violation of desirable (soft) constraints will affect the value of the objective function. The criterion of the schedule quality for the problem of compiling an academic schedule will be the objective function, which is the sum of the products of the penalty coefficients for failure to fulfill each desirable requirement and the assessment determining the degree of failure to fulfill this desirable requirement. The peculiarities of the problem under consideration are the presence of a mandatory restriction on the compactness of the placement of classes (classes must be placed as close to each other in time as possible), a mandatory restriction that lectures must come before practice, a large number of streams and many external part-timers. A comparison of the presented model with some of the most important models of other authors for the study is carried out.