What is Cotiro?
In short, Cotiro aims to be the fastest, most intelligent, most cross-platform scheduling system available. Cotiro can handle two different types of complex scheduling problems -- college time and room scheduling, and shift-based employee scheduling.
Need more explanation? In some instances, scheduling can be a simple process. For example, scheduling a meeting with a co-worker. You find a time that both of you are free, and schedule the meeting. On the other hand, consider trying to schedule a college time and room schedule. You have potentially hundreds of teachers, hundreds of courses that need to be taught, and a limited set of buildings and rooms in which to teach these courses -- not to metion limited time in a day. You also have teacher preferences for when and where they'd like to teach, varying class sizes versus varying room sizes, and many other factors to consider.
For any schedule of sufficient size, this can prove to be an intractable problem to solve. This is where Cotiro comes in. Cotiro was born out of undergraduate and graduate study in artificial intelligence, and employs highly intelligent methods in order to quickly and efficiently produce a schedules which takes into account all of these factors. In time, Cotiro will be generalized to be able to handle any complex scheduling problem.
Additionally, Cotiro is a Java program, which means it can run on just about any operating system, so you can use whatever you are already using. Cotiro is open source, so if you need to modify the way it works, you are free to do so. Cotiro is also based on XML and open standards, which opens the doors to integration with other systems, and eases future maintenance.
Cotiro is currently under active development. However, it is quite useable in its current form. It's just not as "polished" as it will be in time, and may not be as easy-to-use or have all of the features you may desire.
What's Here
There's lots of material here for you to view if you are interested in Cotiro. If you're really interested, the best place is probably the Downloads page, where you can download current and past versions of Cotiro. Remember Cotiro is open source, so the Java source code is included with all packages.
In the Documentation section, you will find the Cotiro manual, as well as a paper that was written on the algorithms employed in Cotiro, if you are interested in such things.
Lastly, there is a forum where you can interact with other users of Cotiro (and other programs I have developed). You can also make a donation if you'd like to help fund future development of Cotiro.
Who's Behind Cotiro?
Cotiro was developed entirely by Gregory G. Leedberg. It started out during my undergraduate studies at the University of New Hampshire as a research project into constraint satisfaction. I released it publicly during my graduate studies at Cornell University, and subsequently resumed active development on it.
Questions? Comments? Feel free to send me a message. I really do read all of them!
News
March 14, 2008 - Released Cotiro 0.7.8. For details on what's new in this release, refer to the history page.
January 25, 2008 - Released Cotiro 0.7.7. For details on what's new in this release, refer to the history page.