What 'automatic' should actually mean
Automatic school timetabling is often sold as a single button: press it, get a timetable. In practice, every planner knows the work happens before and after that button. The data has to be correct, the constraints have to match the school's rules, the result has to be inspected, and edits usually follow.
Smootables is designed around that real workflow. The solver is fast, but the value is in the pre-solve validation, the infeasibility explanations when generation cannot succeed, and the editing tools that let planners stay in control after generation.
How a timetable is generated
From a validated school year plan, the solver produces a feasible period timetable in four steps.
- Pre-generation validation explains missing data, impossible workloads, capacity issues, and likely infeasibility before you wait for a solve.
- Constraints are read from the planning model: teacher and room conflicts, capacity, availability, weekly loads, lunch and break rules, pinned lessons, dependencies, and resource compatibility.
- The solver places lessons across the period, respecting hard constraints and optimizing against configurable soft preferences.
- Results are presented as an editable timetable, with a waiting area for lessons that could not be placed under the current rules.
Constraints the solver understands
Hard constraints
Teacher conflicts, room conflicts, group conflicts, optional student conflicts, availability, capacity, weekly loads, lunch, breaks, pinned lessons, dependencies, and resource compatibility.
Soft constraints
Gap hours, balance across days, preferred times, teacher preferences, student experience, room quality, and school-specific priorities you can re-weight.
Pre-solve checks
Validation flags impossible workloads, missing teachers or rooms, and capacity problems before the solver runs, so planners do not spend time interpreting opaque failures.
Infeasibility reports
When a timetable cannot work as configured, Smootables explains why and suggests concrete fixes instead of returning a silent no-result.
After the solve: planner editing
A solver result is rarely the final timetable, but the goal is to get you to a 90%+ finished schedule out of the box quickly. Planners need to move lessons, swap teachers, split a workshop into two halves, or pin a lesson that absolutely must stay where it is and regenerate the rest. Smootables supports drag-and-drop edits, swaps, split and merge, pin and regenerate, slot insight before a drop, undo and redo, version history, and timetable branches so you can compare alternatives instead of overwriting a working draft.
Lessons that cannot be placed under the current rules go to a waiting area instead of stopping the automatic timetable generation. Planners can resolve those manually, relax a constraint, or send them back to the solver after adjusting the plan.
Questions about automatic timetabling
Does the AI generate the timetable on its own?
No. Generation is based on solving a mathematical multi-constraint optimization problem using algorithms, not AI-only. The AI assistant helps planners describe what they want, validates commands before applying them, explains tradeoffs, and runs scenario comparisons.
What happens if no feasible timetable exists?
You get an infeasibility report instead of a broken result. The report explains which constraints conflict, which resources are over-committed, and what changes would make a solve possible. Many infeasibility cases are caught earlier by pre-solve validation.
Can we pin parts of the timetable?
Yes. Pinned lessons are treated as hard constraints during regeneration, so you can lock placements you have agreed and let the solver work around them. Locked resources, branches, and version history make it safe to experiment.
Does it handle vocational constraints?
Yes. Smootables is designed for schools whose timetables involve workshops, specialist rooms, equipment, mixed cohorts, off-site or workplace learning, and individual student pathways — not only standard class periods.
How is Smootables different from aSc Timetables?
Both can auto-generate timetables. aSc Timetables is built around that generation step: you set up constraints, run the solver, and refine the result. Smootables starts with the year plan — courses, teachers, workloads, and rules all live in one workspace. You validate before you generate, catch staffing problems early, and regenerate without exporting data to a separate tool. If generation speed is your only priority, aSc may still suit you. If planning, workload visibility, and individual student pathways matter as much as the final schedule, Smootables is built for that workflow.