Overview of Room Assignments and Optimization

After the Domain Scheduler reviews and verifies the room preferences and requirements, room assignments must take place. If the room assignment process has already occurred outside of EMS within the SIS, the Domain Scheduler could simply publish the course schedule in EMS without any further effort. In most situations courses need to be assigned a room through the optimization process before the term can be published.

To optimize the room assignments, and then assign rooms, the Domain Scheduler carries out the following steps either separately or in any combination to best suit their working needs:

1. Pre-assignment – The Domain Scheduler manually assigns a selection of courses to rooms. Typically, the manual assignment takes place if these rooms are to be excluded in an optimization scenario after pre-assignment. For instance, if only a swimming course should be assigned to “Pool,” then the Domain Scheduler could manually pre-assign Swimming and then exclude the pool in the optimization scenario. See About Creating Scenarios and Optimization and Create Scenarios.
2. Optimization – The EMS system automatically assigns rooms to courses based on room preferences, requirements, and weighted criteria.
3. Locking In Assignments – After carrying out an optimization scenario, the Domain Scheduler locks in room assignments, and then re-optimizes the remaining portion of the optimization scenario.

The information in this section is presented as an ordered series of standalone procedures. The Domain Scheduler can carry out any of the procedures separately or in any combination as necessary to best suit your working needs. This allows the Domain Scheduler to test a number of potential scenarios and compare placement results using various tools before choosing the final scenario for publishing.