The UF College of Dentistry is the only public-funded dental school in Florida and is recognized as one of the top U.S. dental schools for the quality of its educational programs, oral health research enterprise and commitment to patient care and service. Ranked among the top schools of pharmacy nationally, the college supports research, service and educational programs enhanced with online technologies. Co-located with the Shands Jacksonville Hospital, the Jacksonville Health Science Center excels in education, research and patient care that expresses our abiding values of compassion, excellence, professionalism and innovation. Our state-of-the-art medical center serves an urban population of 1 million from north Florida to south Georgia. Also offered on campus is an American Society of Health-System Pharmacists-accredited pharmacy residency program at Shands Jacksonville.

This system has been deployed since 2010. Dental school timetabling differs from other university course scheduling in that certain clinic sessions can be used by multiple courses at the same time, provided a limit on room capacity is satisfied. Starting from a constraint-programming solution using a web interface, we have moved to a mixed integer programming-based solver to deal with multiple objective functions, along with a dedicated Java application, which provides a rich user interface. Solutions for the years 2010, 2011, and 2012 have been used in the dental school, replacing a manual timetabling process, which could no longer cope with increasing student numbers and resulting resource bottlenecks. The use of the automated system allowed the dental school to increase the number of students enrolled to the maximum possible given the available resources.

We describe a constraint-based timetabling system that was developed for the dental school based at Cork University Hospital in Ireland. Dental school timetabling differs from other university course scheduling in that certain clinic sessions can be used by multiple courses at the same time, provided a limit on room capacity is satisfied. Solutions for the years 2010, 2011 and 2012 have been used in the dental school, replacing a manual timetabling process, which could no longer cope with increasing student numbers and resulting resource bottlenecks. The use of the automated system allowed the dental school to increase the number of students enrolled to the maximum possible given the available resources.

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We describe a constraint-based timetabling system that was developed for the dental school based at Cork University Hospital in Ireland. This sy stem has been deployed since 2010. Dental school timetabling differs from other university course scheduling in that certain clinic sessions can be used by multiple courses at the same time, provided a limit on room capacity is satisfied. Starting from a constraint programming solution using a web interface, we have moved to a mixed integer programming-based solver to deal with multiple objective functions, along with a dedicated Java application, which provides a rich user interface. Solutions for the years 2010, 2011 and 2012 have been used in the dental school, replacing a manual timetabling process, which could no longer cope with increasing student numbers and resulting resource bottlenecks. The use of the automated system allowed the dental school to increase the number of students enrolled to the maximum possible given the available resources. It also provides the school with a valuable “what-if” analysis tool.