Planning and delivering a major training programme for thousands of users is no easy task. Scores of courses need to be prepared, trainers assigned, and rooms booked to run a training scheudle with hundreds of sessions, in such a way that maximises choice and minimises impact on hospital services.

In the general case, specific classes will only be taught by a subset of trainers. Those trainers may have personal availability constraints, pre-booked holiday, may need preparation time between classes, and realistically can only be in one location on any one day if the training is being delivered over multiple sites.

Classes are specific to particular groups of users, may have particular days their trainees can be available, may have multiple parts or prior dependencies on other classes, specific room requirements, and more. Rooms may have prior bookings, and varying capacities. Booking a large room for a few attendees is wasteful.

So it's complicated. Producing such a large schedule with a complex set of goals and resource constraints is challenging, and can take even a skilled and experienced training planner many days to complete.

But Ideal wanted to know - could it be automated?

So put simply, the challenge was to produce a detailed schedule with enough online and face to face classes for each course to satisfy the predicted demand for student places, within the constraints of room capacities, trainer skills, and availability. Courses should be distributed evenly across the training period, made available on a variety of days of the week, and their delivery fairly shared amongst the trainers assigned to give them. However, it _also_ makes sense to schedule multiple classes in the same room on the same day using the same trainer, if the other goals have been met.

In close consultation with the training manager, and over 2 or 3 iterations, I designed, proposed, and built a series of increasingly sophisticated software algorithms to efficiently perform the above task in VBA - not only obeying the many diverse constraints, but also producing schedules with a balance of desirable qualities - such as high utilisation of rooms and available trainers.

The user (typically the training manager or an associate) defines all the variables and constraints, and at the press of a button, the software does the rest - generating a schedule with hundreds of classes, assigned trainers and room bookings.

Thus far, the solution seems to be working very well indeed. In around 10-15 minutes the software generates a schedule of possibly 1000 classes over 50 courses – a task that might otherwise take a skilled user many days.

Update: The tool has seen use on several major training projects, and I have worked with Ideal to incorporate additional features and functionality.