UVictoria Discrete Math Seminar: Richard Hoshino

School timetabling is a complex problem in combinatorial optimization, requiring the best possible assignment of course sections to teachers, timeslots, and classrooms.

For educational institutions, the Master Timetable dictates to every single teacher and student where they need to be at each hour of the school day. Given its importance, school administrators spend weeks or months constructing the annual Master Timetable, often using Post-it notes or wall magnets to assign a teacher, classroom, and timeslot to each section of a course.

When timetables are constructed by hand, the process is often 10% mathematics and 90% politics, leading to errors, inefficiencies, and resentment among teachers and students.

To address these concerns, a field of Discrete Mathematics known as "automated timetabling" has emerged, to create mathematically-optimal timetables for schools.

Over the past five years, I have had the privilege of creating over 50 Master Timetables for various high schools across Canada, including all three of Victoria's independent schools. In this informal interactive talk, I will describe how I create these timetables by modelling the school's constraints as an Integer Linear Program.