DaDDy: A data driven dynamic course table planner

Abstract

Crowd simulation technologies and systems can show and tell a lot of insights on massive crowds' movement behavior. Benefiting from such characteristics, they have found themselves useful in many application fields. On the other hand, a typical educational institution, such as university, has a large body of student population, whose course schedules dominate their daily movement patterns. How to arrange courses according to the school resource of building vacancy and road availability is thus an important problem to be solved by administrators. Traditional ways of arranging course tables are solely based on the consideration of faculty and students schedule availability, often causing road congestions on campus. Furthermore, such arrangements may not be optimized for emergency situations, under which student crowds need to be evacuated. Enlightened by these observations, we designed and implemented a system dubbed as DaDDy Planner (Data Driven Dynamic Planner) which allows school administrators to compare multiple planning solutions of course table visually. Our system makes use of crow simulation and shows advantage in usability as well as efficiency.