Schedule calculation

When we entered the schedule, you can run the calculation with a green icon. After entering at least one, the schedule get a list of where your schedules is at. If you are using a free account, “Free user” will be displayed in the top right corner of the page.

The rightmost column (Options) contains buttons to interact with the schedules. The state of the blue/green/yellow/red status button determines what actions are available. The disabled buttons will appear greyed-out.

The image below shows schedules in different states. The red and yellow icons point to an error or other condition.

First column

The colored icons on the left side of the button-box hold the symbol that denotes the current state of the schedule. - more on this here.

Second column

Second from the left is the Gantt-diagram button. Click it, to receive a visual representation of the schedule-plan in a separate browser-window. (You can zoom in on the calendar-diagram as much as you want. And of course, sift the data through a variety of filters, to display only what you need to see at a given moment.)

Third column

The third is the eye-shaped icon. This will take you to the page where the various table-representations of your schedule, each showing one of the key aspects of how the schedule is measuring up to the requirements that you had set, will inform you about the current solution, enabling your judgement to determine when you will be satisfied with the result.

Fourth column

The rest of the functions will appear as a drop-down menu if you click on the rightmost icon in the button-box (The downward facing arrow).

The following is what they are used for:

From beginning

Press this button to start the calculation from scratch. You will lose all progress that has been made so far. (Consider first making a copy of the work done so far(see the second line of the drop-down menu)). The creation of a new schedule will commence. The new schedule will NOT resemble the old one and here is why:

Composing a good scheduling result is a very difficult task for any kind of intelligence, be it biological or digital one. The space of possibilities is huge, almost infinite from a human standpoint. The amount of good results is also large, but it is very much diluted among the huge number of non-optimal or even outright inconsistent solutions. For this reason, two separate instances of WoShi solver will seldom find the exact same solution. The quality of both solutions will probably be very similar, but the details may vary. The sheer number of combinations for a moderate schedule can easily exceed the number of atoms in the observable Universe. A brute-force computation would never deliver a good result.

Copy

To back up a schedule in advance (before making changes, or starting over with the calculation from scratch), make a copy and save the schedule under a different name. Then, under the new name (e.g. schedule_for_may_2016_excluding_john_on_sick_leave), institute the changes to the revised version (Thus, keeping the old version just in case).

Lock

When you see that the schedule has settled into a form that you find to your satisfaction, (This will happen, when the state of the schedule begins to touch down, at or very near the platform you have set through the constraints, entered on the New Schedule form, as witnessed by the fact that changes made by the solver have become few and far apart (also smaller). ) lock away the arrived-at solution by clicking on the "Lock-in-solution" button in the drop-down menu. The status icon will turn into a padlock on a grey background (see 3rd line in the image above) . This, as opposed to just pausing the calculation, will insure you do not accidentally resume changes on a schedule that you have already published for use by your staff.

Reset

Use this command when you need to revise the constraints-and-requirements form (see New Schedule), and then start over with the calculation. This command is similar to the "From scratch" command mentioned above. The only difference is that, here, the calculation won't automatically restart. Instead, you will restart it manually when you are done revising the constraints and requirements.

Manually

You might resort to manual alterations of the schedule on some rare occasions. As a general principle, manual alterations might be a viable solution on occasions, when you wish to institute a small request of your own on the schedule, for which you estimate, that it would take unnecessarily long to obtain, - through the reorganization of the entire schedule - were you to instead alter the constraints and requirements (the New Schedule form), and resubmit the problem to the solver-algorithm. For instance, when you find an improvement to the schedule, that already fits into the established schedule-structure.

A concrete example of this might be a pair of your employees, who have agreed amongst themselves, to swap shifts. Another example would be, that an employee called in sick and you want to resolve the situation with the least amount of fuss.

View Form

This option is for when you want to review the New Schedule input form, but unlike with the edit option, you will be completely safe from any accidental changes you might have been in danger of adding, had you resorted to viewing the completed form in edit mode. Likewise in certain states, the editing of the script is disabled - e.g. while the solver-algorithm is executing calculations on the given schedule.

Criteria

Criteria can be selected different for each new schedule, yet in practice, you are more-likely-then-not, to have most of them, more-equal-then-not, across all schedules (At least while you are scheduling for the same organisation and the same collective of employees).

WoShi comes with a default arrangement of criteria, yet there is no guarantee that they will be an exact match for the requirements of your organisation. Thus, you will definitely do well to check them out, and see where you might tweak them, in order to get them to serve you as best as possible (Since they do play a rather central role, in directing WoShi's solver-algorithm, towards finding a good solution for your schedule.).

Please note:

The Active and Archived schedules will be empty when you first log in, since you won't yet have started to assemble any schedules.