Scheduling (SCH) domain offers LUs (e.g., courses, final exams, special events, extension) by building and publishing LU schedules and managing the resources (e.g., instructors, space, equipment) associated with that offering. Scheduling processes can be distributed, centralized or a combination, including other institutions (e.g., sister campuses or Extension programs) that utilize the same space for some portion of their offering. Both supply and demand scheduling are required and most institutions use a combination of these approaches (pre-registration and post-registration) to provide the best offering of LU. Kuali Student teams articulated a vision where users of the system would have much greater flexibility and analytic capability available to them. These new capabilities would replace the myriad of shadow systems currently required to manage the scheduling of campus resources.
The twin hearts of the SCH application would rely on powerful optimization and rules engines. The optimization engine takes into account resources, requests, preferences, priorities, etc. in order to build the "best" schedule. Additionally, the optimization should attempt to incorporate priority rules that reward departmental cooperation and flexibility in resolving scheduling conflicts while discouraging unhelpful behaviors (e.g. late submission of scheduling data, excessive requests for exceptions, etc.). The rules engine would provide immediate feedback to departmental users about scheduling request acceptability. The rules engine will have an exception sub-system to allow for the modification of scheduling rules in specific instances. The rules engine will be extensive, and will include a wide variety of rules including (but not limited to) data completeness rules, authorization rules, enrollment planning, submission timing, activation, sharing & cross-listing, course cancellation, contact hours, and many others.