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.

Once Allocate has been deployed (as described here), it is ready to be used for staff allocation.

Important

Workflow

Stuff

Here