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General notes |
  
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General notes |
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If you have not worked with the weighting parameters before, we would suggest you proceed as follows:
First, familiarise yourself with all the weighting parameters and their functions.
Then, move the sliders for all the attributes that do not apply to your school under any circumstances to the very left (position 0 = unimportant), for instance, for "Optimisation of the off-site rooms" if your school has no off-site rooms.
Hint!
If in doubt about the relative importance of an attribute, set the slider to position 1 (not very important) instead of 0.
Next, adjust the remaining sliders in order of increasing importance from "not very important" to "extremely important".
Watch the frequency with which you assign the different levels of importance. As a general rule, it is desirable to assign the weighting settings between 1 (not very important) and 5 (extremely important) in roughly equal numbers, or in decreasing frequency as the level of importance increases. Please see the example shown in the two graphs (the x axis shows the 6 weighting levels, the y axis shows the relative frequency of each weighting).
You should never end up with a distribution where a disproportionately large number of weightings are set to 0 or 1 (unimportant/not very important) or to 5 (extremely important). Another undesirable situation is a frequency that increases with increasing weighting importance.
Caution
The difference between the weighting level 4 and 5 is much higher than between 3 and 4. If you have selected too many settings of "extremely important", the optimisation tool will be restricted to the extent that it can only schedule a fraction of the periods. Hence, set levers on level 5 only if is is absolutely necessary.
The construction of a good timetable is not a matter of frequently selecting the highest weighting, but of accurately representing the different conditions at your school.