Room group

A room group assembles rooms that meet the same needs and are interchangeable (lecture halls, labs, rooms with the same capacity, etc.). The use of room groups allows you to delegate the final distribution of rooms in HYPERPLANNING: instead of blocking the room for a course, you indicate you require a room - for example, among those with 40 seats - available in the time slot where the course is to take place.

Setting up

Create a room group

1. Go to the tab Schedules > Rooms >  List.
2. If it has not already been done, create the room that you plan to put in a room group (Room).
3. The group entry is the same as a room: click on the creation line, enter the name of the group and validate using the key [Enter].
4. Double-click in the column No. to indicate the number of rooms to be assembled; this is what differentiates a room from a room group from the list.  New  It is now possible to enter a number of rooms greater than 100 (up to 999 rooms).

Link the rooms to the group

So that a room can be linked to the group, they must:

• have all its unavailability included in those of the group;
• not be linked to another group;
• if site management is activated, be on the same site as the group (Remote sites).

1. Go to the tab Schedules > Rooms >  Management of the room groups.
2. Select the room group from the list on the left.
3. Click-drag a room from the list on the right to the central list to add it to the group.

If you link the rooms to a group when the courses allocated to the group are already placed, HYPERPLANNING calculates the number of rooms necessary to cater to the needs of the group. The notice  appears as many times as there is a requirement for rooms. The rooms that can fulfill the needs of the group are displayed with a green dot; the rooms that partially fulfills the needs of the group, with an orange dot. There must be at least two partially free rooms to replace a necessary room.

Utilization

Reserve a room from a group for a course

When you allocate a room group to a course, you reserve a room from the group without deciding which one beforehand.

1. From the course form, click on + Rooms.
2. In the popup window, select the room group (identifiable by the arrow that precedes it).
3. If you want to reserve more than one room for every course, double-click in the column No. and specify the number of rooms that you want to reserve for the course.

Automatically allocate the rooms to the courses

The automatic allocation of rooms to the courses is conducted group by group, once the courses are linked to the groups and the courses are placed,

HYPERPLANNING takes into account:

• the preferential rooms of the teachers and classes if they were specified (Preferential room);
• the limitation of movement of teachers and classes if courses take place on remote sites (Remote site);
• the order of the rooms in a group.

1. Go to the tab Schedules > Rooms >  Management of the room groups.
2. HYPERPLANNING by priority occupies the first room on the list, if needed modify the order of the rooms with the arrows on the top right of the list.
3. If site management is activated, choose which movements should be limited; those of the teacher or those of the class.
4. To only process some courses, beforehand conduct an extraction of the courses in the list of courses and tick Only from extracted courses.
5. Click on the button Automatically allocate the rooms on the bottom right.
6. Once all the rooms of the groups are allocated to the courses, you can click on the button Optimize room distribution to allow HYPERPLANNING to improve the distribution.

Cancel the automatic distribution of the rooms

1. Go to the tab Schedules > Courses >  List.
2. Once the rooms of the group are allocated to the courses, you can again replace these rooms by their group: select the concerned courses, right-click and choose Replace the rooms by their respective group.

Use the room groups for other needs

As a rule, the groups are to manage a limited number of specific rooms. With a little imagination, the room groups allows you to manage other situations. Here are a few examples…

Equipment management

Example: your institution has 5 video projectors.

1. Create a room group VIDEO with 5 for the number of rooms.
2. Create the 5 video projectors as classes and allocate them to the group VIDEO.
3. Add this room group to all the courses requiring a video projector.

Managing rooms with variable capacity

Example: a chemistry laboratory can hold 2 groups of the 10th grade but only one group of the 11th grade.

1. To symbolize the variable capacity of this room, create a group of 2 rooms (Chem A and Chem B), each one representing a half of the laboratory.
2. Insert this room group in the courses of the 11th grade and enter 2 as the number of necessary rooms in the column No. (because this public mobilizes all the laboratory, meaning the two halves that compose it, Chem A and Chem B).
3. Insert this room group in the courses of the 10th grade leaving 1 the number of rooms (only half of the laboratory is necessary, Chem A or Chem B).

Limitation of the number of simultaneous courses in the same subject

Example: you want to impede the placement of more than 2 courses of video editing at the same time.

1. Create a room group EDITING with 2 for the number of rooms.
2. Insert an occurrence of EDITING in all the video editing courses.
3. Once the courses are placed, delete the group of all its courses.