Scheduling officials to games now has a powerful automated scheduling functionality similar to our games scheduler. We still support the manual assignment of officials to games (that owners of our previous versions have used), but the screens are now a bit different and you'll need to get use to where things have moved.
The first thing that you will notice if you have been using other portions of the software, is that the screen contains game selection parameters similar to the Schedule Management Grid and other screens.
The first step is to enter the proper parameters at the top of the screen to display the games you wish to schedule with officials. Once all parameters are selected, then click the 'Display Games' button to retrieve all games. The only display parameter not at the top is the officials selection criteria. The checkbox to the left of the Display Games button, "Display games only for selected officials", if checked will display only games officiated by the officials selected under the officials tab at the bottom of the screen. More about that option will discussion later.
The parameter list, while extensive, may not be enough to ensure every game you display are the only games you wish to schedule. Of course you can run numerous scheduling runs on smaller subsets of games, but there are advantages of running a large scheduling run (like better leveling of games, locations and times). To accommodate this, when you do display games, you can select the ones you wish to schedule, so in fact you can eliminate unwanted games. There are two buttons to the top left of the grid, 'Select All', 'Deselect All' which as you would guess either selects all games or none.
Your next step is to select all the games you wish to schedule. Selecting game is important from this perspective. The software will consider all official assignments that have already been saved when judging compliance to all parameters. So for example, a schedule run allocating one scorekeeper and one referee will only consider the selected games in its schedule run. It will ignore all games not selected as if they never existed. So if you want to ensure that the maximum number of games per official is not breached, if you have already scheduled 20 games one week and need to schedule an additional 5 games, if you select only the 5 games to schedule, the software will ignore the assignments made in the other 20 games. Therefore in the 5 games being scheduled, and official may exceed his/her maximum assignments in a week. A better method would be to select all 25 games. The 20 games with existing official assignments will be included in the scheduling run but since they already have achieved the one scorekeeper, one referee assignment, no further officials will be assigned to those games. However, the software will add official assignments of the 20 games to the additional 5 and enforce that an official does not exceed the maximum games, achieved the minimum number of games, has equal location or time assignments, etc. This is an extremely powerful function.
The next step is to enter your schedule parameters and save them as an officials scheduling record. The first time you enter this screen, the bottom half of the screen will be in add mode since no schedule record will have yet to be added. After records are added, the first alphabetically will be displayed with this screen is navigated to. Before describing all the parameters, it is worth discussing first how officials will be assigned to games.
As you start entering the numerous parameters you may be wondering how each is going to affect the outcome of the scheduling run. There are no detailed formulas to provide and the approximation methods used are quite proprietary. But in order to effectively schedule games, there are some things you need to know. Games are looked at chronologically and assigned one official at a time. Multiple officials can be assigned to one game. The officials assigned to games are based on the officials obtaining the highest score amongst all parameters. The parameters allow you to determine which is more important for your schedule and which is less important, or which you do not wish to consider at all. By adjusting the parameters, you can come up with endless number of different combinations for your schedule, so if something is not quite right, you have a lot of flexibility in your own hands to fix it.
The following are detailed descriptions of each parameter.
Select the number of Officials to Schedule per game: The basis of the scheduling is matching the various different official types to games. For each official type in the grid, select the number of each that will be scheduled per game. Only officials that have an official type in the grid with a value will be scheduled. Based on the number and types of officials being scheduled, the games display grid will display one column per official. So if you are scheduling 2 referees and 1 scorekeeper, three columns will appear, 2 for referees and one for the scorekeeper.
First Day of Week: This determines the start of the week. Since the officials have minimum and maximum games per week parameters, this value will tell the software when to start counting games for a new week.
Select Officials based on Division Officiating Level: Each division can be assigned a division skill level as defined in the maintenance tables on the preferences screen. By checking this option, the software will utilize the division skill level grid complete under the preference tab on the officials screen. For each game that is to be scheduled the software will take the home teams division (teams are not necessarily in the same division) and find the division skill level. Then each official will have their ranking added into their overall score. With this parameter, a ranking of zero for a division skill level indicates that the official CANNOT officiate a game from a division with that same division skill level.
Schedule only Selected Officials: On the Officials tab, there is a list box with all officials listed. If you wish to schedule all officials (that match the official types being scheduled) then do not check this box. Otherwise if this box is checked, then only those officials selected on the officials tab are used.
Use Official FieldLocation Preferences: This parameter utilizes the Playing Location Preferences set on the Preferences tab of the Officials screen. When scoring officials for a particular game the officials rank for that fieldlocation is used. If a rank of zero appears for that fieldlocation then the official will not be scheduled to any game on that fieldlocation. If the official has a ranking, the higher the ranking the more likely the official will score high for a game and be assigned to it. If the official has no ranking (blank and not zero) then the "Blank Default" field is used as a replacement for all blank rankings.
Use Official Pairing Preferences: If your games require more than one official per game to be scheduled, this parameter can be used pair up officials that wish to officiate together. The Official Pairing Preferences grid on the Preferences tab of the Officials screen allows each official to rank their preference for officiating with other officials. A ranking of zero indicates that those officials will NOT be scheduled to officiate together. If the officials have a ranking, the higher the ranking the more likely the officials will be assign to the same games. Other preference that you intend to use can also impact who officials officiate with. If the officials have no ranking (blank and not zero) then the "Blank Default" field is used as a replacement for all blank rankings.
Minimum Rest between Games: The value you enter is used to restrict the time between officials games. If the value entered is in minutes, then the value is added to the ending time of the officials last game scheduled, and no game will be scheduled until the number of minutes have elapsed. If the value is in days, then the number of days is added to the last game scheduled and no game can be schedule until the number of days has elapsed. The time of the game is not relevant. For example, if the minimum rest is 3 days, then if an official was scheduled at 9:00pm on a Monday, then could not officiate another game until Thursday. Any time Thursday a game can be scheduled, the software does not wait until 9:00pm on Thursday. If you want to wait until 9:00pm then you should used minutes and a large value like 4320 (1440 minutes in a day). If no value is entered, the official can be scheduled immediately after the ending of a game.
Enforce Officials Game In Succession Values: The officials screens have two fields, minimum games in succession and maximum games in succession. When the software assigned officials, it can block an official to do a certain number of consecutive games on the same fieldlocation. You may or may not want the software to use those values for a particular schedule run and can turn it off or on with this parameter.
Enforce Officials Game In Succession Values: On the Officials screen you can determine the minimum and maximum games in succession and official can officiate. Checking this option will enforce those parameters. If you uncheck this box, those values are ignored for officials scheduling.
Game Distribution: The software will either try to schedule an equal number of games for each official or schedule games for each official weighted by the maximum number of games per week. For example if three officials have their max games per week values of 4, 6, 8 then if the software is to schedule 9 games the number of games per officials would be proportional to their maximum number of games or 2, 3, 4.
Enforce Travel Time Between FieldsLocations: Mainly for tournament play where a number of games are scheduled during the same day at different locations, officials may require a travel time between locations. On the Playing Locations screen the Location Distances tab has a grid which cross references each playing location or each individual fieldlocation. The column in the grid called travel time is the number of minutes a team or official must wait at the end of a game played on one fieldlocation and the time another game can be started on the another fieldlocation. If you have a number of fieldslocations in one playing location then enter the travel times between playing locations to significantly reduce the amount of data entry.
Minimize Travel Distances: This parameter should be used only under the following situation. If officials are officiating a game at one fieldlocation and then travelling from that location to the next, this parameter will attempt to minimize how much traveling the officials do. It also has the effect to keep an official at a single location as opposed to moving them around.
Distribute Officials Equally amongst FieldsLocations: If you wish to have officials officiate games equal on a number of different fieldslocations this parameter will attempt to even officiating on all fieldslocations.
Distribute Equally Amongst Time Categories: The software can attempt to distribute game times equal amongst officials. This function is tied closely to the field 'No. of Time Categories'. The software will take the earliest start time and latest end time amongst all games being scheduled and calculate the total minutes between the two. The software then take the number of time categories and divides those total minutes by the number of categories. For example, if the earliest start time was 7:00pm and the latest end time was 11:00pm then if you decided to use 4 time categories, then the software will attempt to evenly distribute officials between 7:00, 8:00, 9:00 and 10:00pm start times. Be careful. If you selected 3 time categories then the software will evenly distribute games between the categories 7:00-8:19pm, 8:20-9:39pm and 9:40 to 11:00pm (80 minute gaps). The problem is that 7:00 and 8:00pm games are in the first category and the 9:00pm and 10:00pm start times are in the other two categories. Therefore the software will attempt to evenly distribute games and since the 7:00 and 8:00pm games are in the same category, one official may have all their game in the early time category at 7:00pm and another official at 8:00pm. Remember the software distributes even amongst categories and not exact game times.
Many of the parameters in the previous section had a weighting dropdown that was conveniently ignored. Well that was due to the fact that they all play a similar function and are being discussed here. As you elect to distribute officials equally amongst games, locations and other parameters, the software generates internal values and your assigned rankings to generate a final score. The higher the score for an official on one game the more likely the official is to officiate that game. One noticeable factor when we designed this approach was that there needed to be some user control to gauge which factor was favoured over another...and by how much. If for example equal distribution was absolutely the most important, this parameter should be weighted high and others rated lower. You have to be cautious of the weighting in conjunction with the ranking you use for different parameters (location preference, official pairing preference, etc). For example if you set a ranking for a particular location at 10 and set the weighting to 5, then for the purpose of this discussion, the location preference would contribute 50 to the officials scoring for the game at that location. If another official was already officiating the game and the ranking to officiate with that official was a 5 and its weighting was 5, then only 25 points are contributed to the officials total score. You should make a point in all your grids to use a similar scoring for high and low preferences or you weightings are going to not react quite as you might expect. We expect that you will run a number of official scheduling runs tweaking these weightings until the schedule is very close to what would be considered a final schedule. Manual changes are also possible.
Now that all the officials scheduling parameters have been entered, you can now match officials to games, the reason behind setting up these parameters. First, simply click the button and see what happens. Until you commit the official assignments made, everything can be undone. After the software runs through its scheduling routine, the officials are placed on the games grid in the officials column in all CAPS. Any officials in all caps is a temporary assignment and until you click the commit button, these assignments are not saved. If you click the 'Match Officials to Games' button again, the officials in ALL caps are removed and the software will schedule officials again based on any new parameters you have changed.
Keep Previously Generated Games
The software has a lot of flexibility generating officials. One is the ability to keep games you have generated, but not committed, and generate more officials assignments by clicking the 'Match Officials to Games' button. This opens up a lot of opportunity to fine tune your assignments by generating maybe a subset of games, keeping them and running a second set of games which can be joined to the first set. Maybe all scorekeepers are assignment first, then referees afterwards. You can assign officials to one location at a time, one divisions skill level practically anything.
Once you have matched officials and are happy with your assignments, clicking the 'Commit Official Assignments' button will take all assignments in the grid that are in CAPS and permanently assign them to the games (permanent in that the are saved in the system, but can always be undone). The officials will then appear in mixed case indicating that they are saved assignments.
The officials tab is where a listing of officials can be found, scheduling statistics and other information. This grid is used to select officials to include in the scheduling run if you are not scheduling all officials. After a scheduling run is completed, the officials grid will contain statistics from the scheduling run. There are some additional functionality to the right of the grid which allows you to manual change the officials assignments that were made.
Remove Selected Officials from Games: This option will take all games that have been selected, and all officials that have been selected and remove those officials from those games. There are two checkboxes that are used in conjunction with this and other functions.
Remove Committed Assignments? When removing officials from games, if this box is checked then commit official assignments will be removed. These are ones that are live in the software (appear in mixed case)
Remove Generated Assignments? When removing officials from games, if this box is checked then official assignments that have been created by the scheduler but not committed to the software (appear in UPPER CASE) will be removed.
Remove All Officials from Games: This option is similar to removing selected officials except it take all games that have been selected, and removes all officials from those games. The two checkboxes discussed above need to be used.
Assign Officials: You can still manually assign officials to games, similar to earlier versions of the software.
Display the games you wish to manually assign. Make sure that the game to be manually assigned are selected.
After selecting the games, check the officials from the list of officials, that you wish to assign to the highlighted games.
Click the ‘Assign Officials’ button and all officials with a checkmark beside them will be assigned to all games highlighted. If there are any conflicts, then an error message will be given.
This has the same function as the similar button on the Schedules tab. Clicking the 'Commit Official Assignments' button will take all assignments in the grid that are in CAPS and permanently assign them to the games (permanent in that the are saved in the system, but can always be undone). The officials will then appear in mixed case indicating that they are saved assignments.