Truth Maintenance Systems (TMS) have turned out to be very useful for
many kinds of constraint satisfaction problems, for example qualitative reason¬
ing or scheduling. A particularly difficult constraint satisfaction problem, very
well known by course organisers in universities is the arrangement of lectures
according to teachers, students and department constraints and preferences, so
that the problem is solved and everyone is pleased.
The proposal of this project was due to both the interest in knowing how to
solve such a problem, and the fact that a version of de Kleer ATMS, a very
advanced and efficient TMS system, had been built by Peter Ross, and was
available in Edinburgh PROLOG.
This thesis first outlines some of the reasons why an ATMS is useful for a
timetabling problem, how it is used together with PROLOG, in order to produce
a system for solving that problem, and how that system works
