DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN EXAMINATION SCHEDULING AND VENUE FINDER

ABSTRACT Exam Venue and Time Allocation System is a software application that will computerize and deal with the allocation of examination halls and time of a specific academic course of study. The aim of the study is to Design and Implement an Exam Venue and Time Allocation System. In achieving this aim, the following specific objectives were laid out to develop flexible and interactive Examination Scheduling Software that enables the automatic generation of examination schedules for tertiary institutions in Nigeria and develop a simple easy-to-use software that an individual with little or no idea of software application can interact with a great deal of comprehension. The motivation that led to the implementation of the proposed system is that scheduling lectures and practical timetables for a large array of courses is a very complex problem that often has to be solved manually by the center staff even though results are not always fully optimal. The programming languages used are HTML, CSS, JAVASCRIPT, PHP, SQL and JQUERY. The reason why web programming languages was used is because it is platform independent and it is a web-based application. In this work, the course sets, halls and time allocations are represented by a multi-dimensional array on which a local search is performed and a combination of the direct representation of the timetable with heuristic crossover is made to ensure that fundamental constraints are not violated. Finally, the genetic algorithm was applied in the development of a viable timetable system which was tested to demonstrate the variety of possible timetables that can be generated based on user-specified constraints and requirements.