Nova T 6 - auto schedule two single periods as a double wherever possible.

[SteveRichards]

Hi,

 

I've taken over timetabling for the first time and I'm working on a new timetable for a new school structure.

 

I have successfully allocated classes to teachers, built and auto-scheduled a whole school timetable and now I'm trying to make an optimal timetable.

 

Currently, many of our blocks are in the format of eg. Double, Single, Single. This is good in some situations, say to get an even spread of classes, but there are some year groups where students moving around the site is a cause of problems. I have tried in these cases remaking the blocks as Double Double and trying to schedule but auto scheduling is failing.

 

What I've tried to do is tag and schedule my 'problem' years and first schedule only the double periods. After this across the school all I have left is single periods which (I thought) the scheduler would be able to place easily. Sadly some of these remaining singles fail to schedule, even after 48 hours or so processing.

 

Is there any way to make Nova try to first schedule singles together as a double and if it fails, split them?

Are there any other techniques I could try?

[MkII]

Can you relax the one per day rule? Sometimes it's not necessary. Do those lessons have to be doubles.. could you make 3 singles instead?

 

I have no sympathy btw, auto doesn't even start here with dual language and 14 and counting part time staff [emoji24]

[SteveRichards]

Wow... No idea how I would start with that without using auto at least a bit. ... is there a simple way of seeing which teachers are clashing and preventing a lesson from going in a particular place?

 

Anyway, I've tried manually building the schedule for year 9 and year 11 with soft locks on what I've scheduled and with one per day rule relaxed in some instances. I'm not entirely sure what soft lock does but I'm assuming the scheduler tries not to move those sessions unless it has exhausted every other possibility first. Every time something fails, I'm just resetting and then upping the search depth a bit and trying again.

 

Now I'm just checking every now and again to see how it's going.

[MkII]

If you go to the auto screen you can relax rules on what has failed.

 

I usually go to the blocks page to trawl through what's failed first and highlighting the problem "cell" takes you straight to that line on the auto page.

 

I think you're exactly right about the soft lock.

 

Yes it was so much fun playing with the auto build on the training course [emoji24]

 

"Don't let your Head let staff go part time" they said...

Edited May 23, 2018 by MkII