TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Preamble
• Understanding Auto-Rooming Results
  • Score
  • Allocated Rooms
  • Investigating Alternative Rooms
  • Rooming Quality
• Improving Auto-Room Results
  • Further information can be found in the Knowledge Base article below. E10 - How to: Ensure optimal rooming results using auto-room
  • Tips and tricks
• Auto-Rooming Vs Manual Rooming
• Further Reading

Preamble

E10's auto-room function calculates the best rooming solution based on the requirements provided. This article will assist users in diagnosing the results of auto-rooming so that rooming requirements can be incrementally adjusted, resulting in a solution that best suits school needs.  

Detailed information on how to use the Auto-room function can be found here:

E10 - How to: Ensure optimal rooming results using auto-room

A webinar recording exploring best rooming practice can be found here: 

E10 - Effective Rooming Webinar

Understanding Auto-Rooming Results

Score

Once an auto-room is performed, a table will appear that lists the rooming results for each class. Classes will be ordered according to their 'score'; the total penalty of the rooming requirements not satisfied. In other words, the rows at the top are the classes that the algorithm couldn't perfectly room according to existing rooming requirements.

Double click on a class's score cell to get more information about how the score was calculated: 

Allocated Rooms

	Green	Preferred rooms
	Orange	Fallback rooms
	Red	Desperate rooms
	Maroon	Generalist room used as fallback

Investigating Alternative Rooms 

To get more information about why the class has not been placed in a preferred or alternate room, double click on the allocated room. 

This will produce a table showing the currently allocated rooms (striped) for that class as well as other classes' rooming for those periods. In the example below, we can see that 11JAP1 was not placed in its preferred room of R14 for three periods due to 12GRM1. 

Rooming Quality

Improving Auto-Room Results

1. Room data (F5). Check room homeroom or home group entries. Ensure size entry is accurate. Discriminate room types between Generalist preferred G, fallback (G), desperate ((G)), and Specialist S
2. Check Subject room data (Shift-F5) . Ensure enough rooms have been been assigned in the set. Consider designating more fallback rooms for classes that have been assigned multiple rooms.
3. Check Settings > Rooms for 'over-crowd' and 'specialist rooms to be shared' evenly classifications. 
4. Check Class data (F6) at each year group for any hard coded or further restricted rooming. Generally these fields should be left blank leaving the greyed-out room sets to remain. Entries here to over-ride these room sets for individual classes should be used discerningly. 
5. Check the weights used in Rooming Parameters when auto-rooming. The default settings are found to yield best results unless schools have particular needs.

Further information can be found in the Knowledge Base article below. 

E10 - How to: Ensure optimal rooming results using auto-room

Tips and tricks

1. Look closely at the colours of each room assignment. If a room assignment is undesirable for a certain class but displayed in green, rooms sets should be adjusted. Conversely, if a class has been assigned a room that is acceptable but is coloured orange or red, consider adding these rooms as preferred in subject room sets for that course.
2. Investigate classes with a high score by double clicking on the score for that class. If penalties are being given for criteria that are acceptable consider experimenting with auto-room weights. 
3. Investigate classes that have been placed in a large number of distinct rooms. This will normally occur when a large number of classes are demanding a small number of rooms. Try adding to the subject room sets and auto-rooming again to see the results. 
4. If you are unsure as to why E10 is placing a class in a certain room, first view the total room quality score and then try making a change manually. To do this, click on the allocated room, and then select the desired room, as below. 

Now view the total room quality score again. If the score has gone up this means that overall, this is an inferior result according to the current room preferences. Look closer at the rooming quality table to understand why. 

Auto-Rooming Vs Manual Rooming

Further Reading