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Dynamic timetable analysis

Putting together school data for the purpose of creating a timetable presents many challenges and pitfalls. The sheer number of entities entering the process, such as subjects, teachers and rooms, all with different requirements, make it difficult not only to complete the timetable creation, but also to detect problems that prevent it.

Skolaris presents a two-step approach to the problem, performing a static timetable analysis every time a timetable is opened or created, and a dynamic analysis as part of the timetable creation wizard.

The dynamic analysis takes a considerably longer time, because it actually tries to assemble many partial timetables in its course. The rationale behind this approach is that the partial timetables take exponentially less time than the complete timetable and if a partial timetable cannot be created, the complete timetable almost certainly cannot be created either.

Thus, by completing the dynamic analysis, the user quickly gains useful information about the school data. If it fails, changes need to be made before timetable creation is attempted, which can save the user a lot of time. If it succeeds, there can be some degree of confidence that the data entered is correct.

The results of the dynamic analysis cannot be taken as absolute. One can easily contrive an example whereby the dynamic analysis succeeds but the complete timetable cannot be assembled. In general case the problem of whether a timetable exists or not is the same as actually finding one. Therefore, the analyses are useful tools, but they can never be completely reliable.