Volume 2 - Issue 1, January - February 2026

Time-table slot selection is an important administrative task in educational institutions where conflicts may occur due to resource limitations, faculty availability, and class capacity restrictions. Traditional scheduling approaches mainly address hard constraints to ensure feasibility, while soft constraints such as workload balance, avoidance of consecutive lectures, and time slot preferences are often overlooked. This paper proposes a rule-based soft constraint conflict detection system that evaluates existing timetables using predefined IF-THEN rules. The system identifies violations of soft constraints and classifies them into severity levels. Rather than generating an optimized timetable, the framework acts as a decision-support tool by highlighting inefficient scheduling patterns. Experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach in detecting violations and categorizing them based on severity, making it suitable for small to medium-sized academic institutions.

Tanvi Jain,"A Rule-Based Soft Constraint Conflict Detection Framework for Academic Timetables" International Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Research and Educational Development, V2(1): Page(1429-1430) Jan-Feb 2026. ISSN: 3107-6513. www.ijamred.com. Published by Scientific and Academic Research Publishing.