Automatic scheduling for master thesis defenses

Prior to 2017, the schedule of master thesis defenses was managed by the secretaries using only Excel tables and email exchanges. Each students could choose only one subject among those proposed by the commission of the faculty from which he/she depends. Actually, there are many commissions within the EPL faculty and each commission is headed by a single secretary. Today, students can more easily select subjects from other faculties commissions and some subjects deal with themes involving several commissions. Scheduling would, therefore, be better managed jointly and not separately by each program commission. Coordinating between commissions with excel files sent by email only is not a suitable solution and can cause problems. With this kind of method, it is also difficult to have an overall view of all the master thesis (even those who do not belong to the student's commission). Therefore, it would be very useful to have an automated tool to prepare the defenses thesis schedule. This report will show the steps followed to meet the objectives of this master thesis. It will detail the information needed before entering the development phase. Then the way the time was managed as well as how I divided the work to accomplish. It will also show the global architecture of the project, and how the different modules communicate with each other. I will explain in more details the two problems encountered and how I managed to solve them. The first problem, commissions distribution, is clearly trivial because it doesn't require any artificial intelligence. But for the second problem, the scheduling in itself, I will introduce the model I established with the different variables, constraints and the objective function. Then I will show the database model used for the website, how the website works and how the users can use it concurrently. I will also explain how to deploy the application and talk about the backup system. To conclude, I will present the tests and how they were performed as well as all improvements that can be made and the opinion of the users on the application. For each technical part, I will develop the technologies used and why they were chosen.