E10 - Rooms - Room allocations: Auto Room & Improve

This document will explain what the Auto Room and Improve feature can do and how they work.

This function automatically assigns rooms after clearing all current room assignments. Auto rooming makes these assignments based on rooming requirements and preferences, giving optimal results according to internal parameters. All entered data should be verified for accuracy before auto rooming, but auto it can be performed many times, with iterative changes being made to the requirements to receive the desired outcome. Use the reports and analysis tools to identify any issues and examine the quality of the result.

Auto rooming provides the best possible rooming quality with the available resources. It will allocate specialist rooms equitably, giving priority to double periods for subjects requiring Specialist Rooms. E10 also maximises rooming consistency and caters for Home room requests, for both teacher and student groups.

This feature automatically examines the existing room arrangement and attempts to preserve it as much as possible, while examining possible 'improvements' to room quality. It is designed specifically for post-solution changes, where we aim to reduce disruption as much as possible, yet E10 will try to improve the room quality overall. The requirement to retain existing assignments where possible does restrict the algorithm to an extent, but not by a large amount.  As this feature is independent of the global room algorithm, it can be used on a solution which has been fully roomed manually. It is a stand-alone automatic rooming optimise tool which can even be used midyear or on an existing timetable for a new E10 client, to make it even better. 

This feature automatically solves room clashes, with a minimum number of moves.  The benefit of this feature is that it has the least disruption to a timetable already running - but only achieves the bare minimum requirement of resolving room clashes, not improving rooms which are not affected by the clashes. Where clashes can't be resolved they will at least be minimised. This situation would only arise when there have been manual changes made involving the periods in which these classes run. E10 always ensures there are adequate rooms available for all classes for each period, by highlighting any problems during construction, and/or requiring you to examine your rooming options before any auto-generated solution, which will then always be capable of being auto-roomed clash free.