EMS: An examination scheduling and management system

摘要

Scheduling final examinations for a university with different requirements is a tedious and laborious task. This paper describes an expert system called Examination Management System (EMS) which can complete the scheduling very efficiently. In EMS we select the most difficult-to-schedule examination as a candidate for the next scheduling step. When the scheduling process cannot proceed any further for lack of time or room, the system releases the resources occupied by the easiest-to-schedule examinations (among the scheduled) and assigns them to the examination currently under consideration. Some statistical learning methods are applied to dynamically change the focus among the considerations for the requirements or constraints such as direct conflicts and room capacity. Any requirements and expertise can be easily added into or removed from the system, but some trivial ad hoc requirements are needed to be handled in the pre-scheduling part. EMS has been used successfully for two local universities with much time saving and quality improvement.