Allocate

Allocate is a staff allocation tool designed to assist course coordinators in producing a reasonable allocation of course staff (such as tutors) to the available course hours. This allocation needs to be based on a number of factors, including staff availability, preferences about contiguous hours and max hours in a week, and whether the given staff are junior (often requiring supervision of some sort) or senior.

Allocate takes this information about staff availability and other requirements, and uses Google OR-Tools, a software suite which tackles optimisation problems. Within this suite, the tool makes use of the CP-SAT solver specifically. This allows constraint programming (finding a model that meets a set of constraints) and also basic optimisation of that model.

A frontend exists for this, however the backend allocation software can be used independently, and is fully functional.