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Shortening CCCs |
  
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Shortening CCCs |
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The longest chain – the first row in the middle part of the window – contains 27 periods that cannot be scheduled at the same time since this would lead to conflicts, as described above. If you consider that there may be time requests defined for each teacher, class and lesson, that each lesson may have additional conditions imposed on it (e.g. main subjects should not be scheduled too late in the day), that rooms are not always available, and that all this applies equally to the elements of all the other chains (the second longest still has a total number of 24 involved lessons).
Hint!
A large number of chains with many periods can be the cause of a serious timetabling bottleneck.
You now have the option of shortening the chain by assigning a different teacher to individual lessons.
Please note that swapping teachers may not necessarily result in a shortening of the chain. In the worst case scenario, it may even result in a lengthening of the chain.
A lengthening of the chain can occur when a re-assigned teacher is a member of a different teacher team that is not yet part of the chain. When two (or more) teacher teams end up sharing a teacher after a swap, the increased number of teacher teams means there is a high probability that the teachers will block each other.