Registro Timetabling Automation by EDTEX: "The AI timetabling office for universities"

Hello,

My name is Arun, and I am one of the co-founders of EDTEX (https://www.edtex.in). I am posting this message for anyone in charge of academic operations at a university, or who has volunteered to automate them.

We built and successfully deployed customised academic operations solutions at leading Business Schools, Law Schools and Universities: ISB Hyderabad, SDA Bocconi Milan, IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore, IIM Calcutta, IIM Lucknow, IIM Kozhikode, IIM Indore, IIM Mumbai and Private Business Schools BITSoM Mumbai, KJSIM Mumbai, NMIMS Mumbai, TAPMI Manipal and Bangalore, Manipal University, Ashoka University, OPJGU, and SNU Noida.

Anyone who has ever put together a timetable will tell you it's never really finished. The first version alone takes several weeks, after which leave requests begin to arrive by email, travel updates slowly come in through WhatsApp, and two programmes end up wanting to use the same lab at the same hour — and with each and every change you have to go over everything again. In the process, you also end up being the one everyone contacts about room availability.

Since 2017, we have developed software for academic offices, and timetabling has always come up in our discussions. That is why we eventually created the Registro Timetabling Automation Platform.

In short, it is academic scheduling software used by universities, business schools, law schools, and medical schools. You provide the institution's rules, rooms, and faculty availability, and it creates a full, clash-free term timetable; it then continuously checks all subsequent changes against those same rules. (On campuses in the United States, the task is generally known as "course scheduling.") Further information is available here: https://www.edtex.in/products/registro-timetable-automation

Here's a story from the timetabling office.

At that stage, the team had spent weeks arranging hundreds of sections around faculty members who can only teach on particular days, rooms shared by three programmes, and numerous rules the institution has built up over the years—most of which are stored in spreadsheets. In the end, it succeeded.

A professor then emails that they will be away during the first week and advises moving one class to Thursday afternoon. This seems harmless until it is discovered that another section already has that room on Thursday afternoon and that half the class is enrolled in a different course during that particular time slot. It is not until two groups of students turn up at the same door on day one that the mistake is noticed.

This is such a difficult problem because of combinatorics; each additional section, room, faculty member, or rule increases the number of possible timetables, with computer scientists in fact considering university timetabling to be NP-hard. Yet most academic offices still deal with it by hand each term.

What Registro actually does?

You provide it with all the information the spreadsheet tried to consolidate—timetable policies, hard and soft constraints, rooms and resources, each faculty member's availability, preferences, and leave. In a single operation, it produces the complete timetable for a term, trimester, semester, or academic year, including multiple programmes, years, sections, and even different campuses. Whether it's core courses, electives, labs, workshops, or quizzes, you can view everything week by week or for the entire term.

If all rules are met, the timetable will be produced without any clashes. If the rules do conflict (which they can), the system identifies the version with the fewest clashes and indicates exactly which time slots your team should adjust manually. It uses a combination of genetic algorithms, backtracking, simulated annealing, and local search, since no single method can handle the scale of an entire university.

Last-minute changes have their own workflow. Instead of sending emails that the office then has to follow up on, staff submit change requests directly through the platform—whether they concern medical issues, travel, or anything else. All requests are stored in a single location and automatically checked against each rule, so moving one class can't silently cause problems for another. Students can see their own timetable in the Registro student portal, which updates as soon as a class is moved.

How do Agents - AI help manage the timetabling operations?

Most of the substantial work begins after the timetable is published: staff and programme leaders ask questions, checks are carried out before each change, and effects nobody anticipated emerge. Registro includes AI agents precisely for this situation. The office can ask questions in plain language and get answers directly from the timetable, and the AI workflows give everyone a clear overview of the current situation at any time during the term.

This results in a true 10x reduction in manual work.

Who can leverage Timetabling Automation for 10X outcomes?

Programme offices, deans' offices, timetabling teams, registrars- in other words, anyone who manages complicated day-to-day and full-year academic schedules. The programme can be used on its own or as part of the broader Registro suite, which includes modules for course bidding, registration, attendance, grading, fees, and feedback, as well as student exchange. It interfaces with Salesforce via an API, exchanges data with ERPs and SIS systems such as Oracle, SAP, Ellucian, and Anthology Student, and supports SSO via Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra ID.

And what about your own institution? How is the timetable put together at your institution nowadays, and what happens when changes are made halfway through? You can write to me at arun@edtex.in