A Classroom Scheduling Service for Smart Classes

During past decades, the classroom scheduling problem has posed significant challenges to educational programmers and teaching secretaries. In order to alleviate the burden of the programmers, this paper presents SmartClass, which allows the programmers to solve this problem using web services. By introducing service-oriented architecture (SOA), SmartClass is able to provide classroom scheduling services with back-stage design space exploration and greedy algorithms. Furthermore, the SmartClass architecture can be dynamically coupled to different scheduling algorithms (e.g. Greedy, DSE, etc.) to fit in specific demands. A typical case study demonstrates that SmartClass provides a new efficient paradigm to the traditional classroom scheduling problem, which could achieve high flexibility by software services reuse and ease the burden of educational programmers. Evaluation results on efficiency, overheads and scheduling performance demonstrate the SmartClass has lower scheduling overheads with higher efficiency.