SGSAScenario Generating Scheduling Assistant

1
SGSA-Scenario Generating Scheduling
Assistant

• Advisor Dr. Levinstein
• Student Sarah Edward
• Nov 12, 2007

2
SGSA-Scenario Generating Scheduling
Assistant

• Introduction
• Objectives
• Application Description
• Features
• Conclusions

3
Introduction

• Scheduling students for courses at ECPI (Newport
  News) has been cumbersome.
• The scheduling is done manually, by using Excel
  sheet.
• Each term they go through each students History
  to schedule.
• Sometimes this results in erroneous scheduling.

4
Snapshot of the Excel Sheet
Course no
Total no classes not taken
Finished course
Scheduled course
5
Derived Requirements and Specifications

• This assistant will be used to schedule students
  for classes every term
• It will allow the DHS to choose the courses
  which will be offered each semester.
• The student will be scheduled for a class
  depending upon the following
• Seniority- Students who are closer to graduation
  will be the first priority to a class.
• Pre-req- Students who have completed the pre-req
  for the course are only considered.
• Limitation Each student should be scheduled for
  only two courses
• The capacity of a class by default is 21.This
  program would try to keep this number, but
  exceptions are allowed.

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Proposed Idea

• Automating the process of scheduling
• Capability of generating different scenarios of
  scheduling
• Giving the user the ability to choose the best
  scheduling report.
• Easy to use and maintain

7
Constraints

• The algorithm has to handle the following
• There are 4 different degrees in ECPI. Old AS,
  New AS, Old BS, New BS.
• Students with a longer gap (from the basic
  course) should be scheduled first for Advanced
  courses.
• If a student doesn't fit in at least 2 courses he
  should be listed with all the exceptions.
• The total number of students should not exceed
  the desired limit.
• The algorithm should look at the History of the
  student, to determine the courses he/she needs.
• The main goal Schedule max no of students but
  effectively.

8
Process Diagram
No
Yes
Yes
No
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Application Description Scheduling Process

• In the beginning of each term, each DH will run
  the scheduler to generate reports.
• The scheduling algorithm picks up only students
  who are active for that term and belong the
  department.
• It checks if the course has a pre-req flags
  students who havent finished the pre-req
• If there is Basic course it flags the students
  who haven't finished the Basic course
• Senior students are always given priority
• This application allows the reports to be
  exported to excel, so that they can save the
  different scenario reports and choose which suits
  them best

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Continued .

• The report clearly indicates the following
• The courses which are being scheduled
  for
• Total no of students With no
  requirement
• Total no of students- With Pre-req
  requirement
• Total no of students- With Basic
  requirement
• The DH can run as many reports as they want with
  different sets of courses and choose the one that
  fits best for the term

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Screen Shot - Schedule Report
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Objective

• To simulate scheduling of students to courses
  that can be used for web-based class as well as
  traditional classes.
• To achieve the following learning objectives
• To gain hands on experience with working on a
  whole project independently, from system
  analysis, design, development, to testing.
• To get more familiar and work more efficiently
  with .NET framework.
• To get more experience with database design and
  maintenance from working on SQL Server 2000.
• To gain more experience on error handling skills
  of ASP.NET programming.
• To practice and gain more hands-on experience on
  user-friendly interface design.

13
Platform

• System environment Microsoft IIS 5.1, Microsoft
  .NET Framework 1.1
• Development tools Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
  2005, Microsoft SQL server 2000
• Languages C, JavaScript, HTML,TSQL

14
Features

• It is a role-based web application.
• It supports at least three roles department
  heads, director of education and administrator.
  (can set more roles e.g. teaching assistant)
• Main functionalities
• For DHS search/edit student records ,add/delete
  a course, generating scheduling reports . All
  DHs will be able to the above only for their
  department.
• For DE search/edit student records ,add/delete a
  course, generating scheduling reports for all
  departments.
• For administrator system maintenance including
  setting users, role, maintain pages, modules and
  page layout.
• For maintenance and auditing purpose there is a
  History table which maintains a log of every
  transaction performed.

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Features System security

• Role-based security
• Role-based security is implemented by good
  database design.
• After user login is authenticated, the user role
  will be retrieved from database and kept as a
  session variable.
• If a user tries to access an unauthorized page,
  the system will redirect to a page that telling
  the user the access is denied.

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Login Page
17
Scheduling Page
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Screen Shot - Schedule Report
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Conclusions

• It is a role-based web application with good
  system security.
• It provides flexible maintenance module for both
  administrator and department head.
• Most important I gained much experience with
  .Net programming and working with a client.

20
Future work
The next step is to integrate this scheduler with
the corporate to make it a unified
Database. Users at ECPI (Newport News) will be
using the tool for a few months (testing) , and
if approved can be used by all branches of ECPI
all over the East Coast.
21
Thank you!
Acknowledgement Dr. Levinstein has given me
valuable instructions on this project. Dr.
Cathy Roberts, a PHD student from ODU,
presently the Department Head of Computer
Science at ECPI provided great help and support
for this project.