Alternative rooms

Since rooms are usually a scarce resource when it comes to timetable construction, Untis provides the additional option of assigning an alternative room.

Since each alternative room can have its own alternative room, you can create entire alternative room rings by entering the original home room as the alternative room of the last alternative room in the chain. The example below shows such an alternative room ring.

Untis can allocate either one of the five rooms, depending on which would improve the optimisation results most. Both the optimisation and the room optimisation tools take into consideration the order in which the rooms are entered – an important criteria in the following two scenarios.

You can either recreate 'geographic' aspects of your school by ensuring that the alternative room order reflects the relative locations of the rooms in the school. This would save teachers and students from wasting precious time when moving from room to room. In an alternative room ring, neighbouring rooms should therefore be listed in sequence.

Another option is to use alternative room rings and chains to place the function of the rooms in context. When a room capacity has been defined for individual rooms under master data, you can list alternative rooms with approximately the same capacity in sequence (in an alternative room ring). Another aspect that could influence the order of rooms in alternative room rings is the equipment provided in the individual rooms.

Classes without a designated room

If your school has classes without designated rooms you can use pseudo rooms by assigning a fictitious room to a class. You can do this by simply assigning a fictitious room, a pseudo room, to the class in question and blocking this room for every period of the week (using time request '-3').

Enter a room from the classroom ring as an alternative room for your pseudo room. Untis will now select a suitable classroom for the class (see figure).

Including pseudo rooms in an alternative room ring.