iUrnik: Timetabling for Primary Educational Institutions in Slovenia

Slovenian primary schools must adhere to a complex curriculum imposed by the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport of the Republic of Slovenia. This complexity makes the scheduling problem challenging. To address this problem, we developed iUrnik, an interactive and automated scheduling system that generates near-optimal schedules using evolutionary computation. We developed our system to produce quality timetables for both students and teachers; however, contradictory goals make this task difficult. iUrnik addresses the complexity of assigning students to elective subjects and enables planners to add constraints and set their parameters. It also provides an advanced substitutions module, which determines and suggests the most appropriate teacher to substitute for an absent one. We used our system at three Slovenian primary schools, and the results we achieved indicate a significant improvement in the scheduling process in comparison to the previous processes these schools used.