Project: Course Scheduling and Timetabling: Simulation and Implementation Student Researchers: Christy Lohrer, Jennifer Wanner, Jennifer Levins Advisors: Gary Lewandowski Institution: Xavier University Course Scheduling involves building student schedules given their course choices. We have designed an algorithm that will either build a timetable that minimizes conflicts in student schedules, or if a timetable already exists, will schedule students to minimize conflicts. This is an NP-Complete problem so we cannot guarantee optimality, but initial theoretical analysis indicates that when students choose their courses uniformly random from all possible courses and a timetable is already constructed, the algorithm schedules students in such a way that expected conflicts are optimal. This project works on three areas related to this problem. First, we are implementing a web-based tool for students to check their course choices against a university timetable. Second, we are simulating the algorithm on random data where course choices follow various statistical distributions including the random uniform distribution as well as distributions not analyzed. Third, we are gathering data on course choices at Xavier University to determine what distribution describes course choices.