General notes

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.

Note:

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. We recommend to decrease the frequency with increasing weighting importance according to the diagram below.

You should never end up with a distribution where a disproportionately large number of weightings are set 'unimportant' (or 'not very important') or to 'extremely important'. Another undesirable situation is a frequency that increases with increasing weighting importance.

Warning:

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 such an extent that it can only schedule a fraction of the periods. Hence, set parameters on level 5 only if it is absolutely necessary.