Alternative room

The alternative room is used for scheduling lessons if the room originally desired is already booked. In our example Gym1 is the alternative room for Gym2 (and vice versa).

Rings of alternative rooms

You may string functionally equivalent rooms together in such a way that that they form a ring of alternative rooms. This has already been entered in the file demo.gpn. The alternative room for R1a is R1b, the one for R1b is R2a and so on until the ring is closed.

If, during automatic timetable scheduling (optimisation), it turns out that the desired room for a lesson (e.g. R1b) is already occupied, then the next rooms in the ring (R2a ...) will be checked until a free room is found in the ring.