Efficient scheduling of university courses

Question

I\'m currently working on a website that will allow students from my university to automatically generate valid schedules based on the courses they\'d like to take.

Answer 1

The way you're currently generating combinations of sections is probably throwing up huge numbers of combinations that are excluded by conflicts between more than one course. I think you could reduce the number of combinations that you need to deal with by generating the product of the sections for only two courses first. Eliminate the conflicts from that set, then introduce the sections for a third course. Eliminate again, then introduce a fourth, and so on. This should see a more linear growth in the processing time required as the number of courses selected increases.