Adaptive Solution Student's Interactive School Timetable

(ASSIST) ver 2.6

ASSIST is a Javascript-based program that is intended to help support decision-making in an online subject registration for schools/colleges/universities that use this methodology. Traditional methods require the user to come up with their own timetable, usually based on the choices they had already made a couple of days beforehand with the help of a guideebook listing all available subjects and classes. The downside of this is users sometimes get stumped on making a timetable, and go to the registration process ill-prepared.

The ASSIST barebones demo in action.

ASSIST is created to help avoid those circumstances. It generates all possible schedules based on the the subjects the users have on their list. A light expert system implementation is included in the form of removing options that the user has already chosen. Timetables are calculated everytime a user adds/removes a subject from the list.

As the program is browser-based, all the schedule processing is done on the user's system, thus no extra load is placed on the server. Data is also passed to the client via XML, which helps reduce network traffic should such data is required again due to the cacheable nature of the document. In most online registration systems (which are usually run in a local network), there are almost hundreds of users who will use the same terminal to register over a period of time (unless the user is registering from an Internet connection), thus storage of data locally is beneficial.

Demonstration

A minimal demonstration of running ASSIST

Releases

The demonstration linked above is available for download at the Releases section our project page at Sourceforge.net.

To be implemented/researched

• Conversion from the current synchronous data transfer to an AJAX-based implementation.
• Current exhaustive search method algorithm is not as cost-effective if there exist total subject clashes in the lowest runlevel. Other possible solutions such as pair-matching or round-robin can be used to detect clashes earlier may be explored.
• If early total subject clashes can be detected, then the clashing subjects may be notified straight away on the choice list.
• Checking whether a class section is already full and remove it from calculation (and thus, from being chosen by the user)
• Sample database-to-XML creator for various server languages (PHP/ASP/CGI etc.)

More info

ASSIST, licenesed under GNU Lesser General Public License, is written and designed by Aminuddin Abdollah. Any enqueries can be delivered to d a n g e r i s m @ g m a i l . c o m.