Automation of the OST-RJ Examination Scheduling

Exam scheduling is a known NP-complete problem.
Finding the best solution for such a problem is near impossible for a human and takes forever for a computer.
Computer-aided exam scheduling, or generally speaking problem solving, takes advantage of trying many possible solutions in an automated way and combining it with algorithms that help optimize the solving process.
Testing the quality of a solution is carried out with several constraints and their assigned penalties and weights.

In this project, a constraint solver called OptaPlanner was used to model the problem domain and create constraints for it, all written in Java.
The constraints correspond to the explicit and implicit constraints the (human) exam planner applies when scheduling the exams.
The data is imported from files, processed, solved, and exported as a file and visualized in a web frontend.

The results are not production-ready but build a reasonable basis for future work.
All hard constraints can be fulfilled, and some of the soft constraints are optimized.
Scheduling the exams becomes much more comfortable, and the manual work can be reduced from several hours to an absolute minimum.