ETH - TOOLS: Room Availability Checker for ETH Zurich

This repository provides a tool to check room availability at ETH Zurich. It not only identifies free rooms but also considers factors like previous schedules to promote a broader distribution of student learning spaces.

⚙️ Setup

We recommend setting up a virtual environment. Using e.g. miniconda, the room_allocation package can be installed via:

conda create -n room-allocation -y python=3.9
conda activate room-allocation

pip install -e .

🏃 Running from commandline

We provide a helper script for easy usage.

find-room -l "Zürich Zentrum"

This will print the top 10 recommendations for the specified location. Available locations are:

• "Schwerzenbach"
• "Basel"
• "Lindau Eschikon"
• "Zürich Universität"
• "Zürich Hönggerberg"
• "Zürich Oerlikon"
• "Zürich Zentrum"

🐍 Running from Python

To run the code, go to the eth_tools/room_allocation directory and execute:

python -m eth_tools.room_allocation.run -l "Zürich Zentrum" --top10

Other Useful Flags

• -b, --building: Constrain search to building.
• --force_update: Fetch new room information for update schedule (higher data intensity).
• --top: Define number of rooms in output.
• -d, --duration: Specify the time duration for which the room should be free.
• --when: Specify the date and time when the room should be free. Use the format 'YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS'
• -v, --verbose: Enable verbose logging

🔧 Development

## Getting started

python -v # ^3.10
pip install poetry
cd path/to/repo
poetry install

TODO

Initially, get recommendation for room now. next : get recommendation for some date this week.

• Caching mechanism - use downloaded files if up to date. Else update files by downloading again.

• Recommendation system for rooms

  • Room needs to be "free" or "Studierendenplätze". empty_rooms(datetime : datetime) -> bool
    • Naive approach - iterate over all rooms and test which room is free.
    • Hash map approach - build mapping :

    # room_allocations[day][time][allocation_type] -> [room]
    def empty_rooms(datetime : datetime): -> bool
        l1 = room_allocations(datetime.day, datetime.time, "free")
        l2 = room_allocations(datetime.day, datetime.time, "free")
        return l1 + l2
    
    # among these rooms create recommendations + enable filters , e.g. based on how long they are free, where they are located, capacity, ...

• Create plotly dash dashboard or similar

• additional functionality like Mensa Recommender. "Mensa-Recommender" + "Room-Recommender".

• Save data in repo folder

• Building dependent room evaluation

• Location based room evaluation with live data

Authors: Max Kieffer, Alex Thillen