Everything on this website, from logo to buttons, from drawings to texts and from photos to php code, I imagined and realised myself. Of course I'm very proud of it! I hope you as a visitor find it even pleasant. All website code (html, css and php) are completely made in Notepad and tested with wampserver and Mozilla Firefox. All drawings were made by hand, scanned and adapted digitally. 3D drawings in section 'Design' were made with Google SketchUp. Logos and buttons were made in Corel PhotoPaint with help of Microsoft PowerPoint. And the pictures? They were made by a digital camera of the Canon PowerShot series and with a tripod of Manfrotto. If one of the mentioned companies is interested in sponsoring, please let me know at info janclaes.be!

Once I started to work on a program for making time tables with students who followed my lessons programming. In class we didn't get that far, but I finished the program on my own. After a redesign and lots of work the program is now practically finished.

The user interface is intuitive. The algorithm is powerful and fast and so an almost perfect time table is calculated in a snap. On top of this the user can influence performance by configuring lots of parameters.

The principle is very easy. The program starts with a totally random time table and gives it a score. Then some random changes are made and a new score is calculated. If the score is better the new time table is used further on, otherwise the previous time table is recovered. This is repeated a couple of times and in this way a great time table has to be found. The force of the algorithm depends of course on the start time table and on the score function. The amount of demands and preferences is the base of the score function. If a demand is violated, the score is lower. When a preference is accomplished the score gets higher. The program ends when no demands are violated anymore. At the same time the resulting time table has followed as many preferences as possible.

What are these demands and preferences? They are inputted per class room, course and teacher. For example not every teacher can teach every course (=demand). Not every course can be given in each room: computer course can't be taught in a cooking class room (=demand). Then there are the many preferences: teachers have their favourite courses, class rooms and moments (=preferences). Some courses are preferred to be taught in certain class room (=preference). At some times we want to keep class rooms available (=preference), and so on, and so on. The more preferences, the harder the puzzle, but also the better the time tables. I tried to build in a maximum of flexibility.

If you are interested in this program and want to find out what this can be for you or your business, please let me know at info janclaes.be!