Analyze the timetable by generation
Analyze generates the timetable for exactly 1 minute and then shows you which cards were causing the most problems.
On some timetables this may help to quickly identify some errors in the input or some bottlenecks that simply cannot be scheduled and had to be fixed before generating the whole timetable. However on some timetables this function will not help much because the cards that are causing most problems are simply, well, the hardest cards.
Lets now have a look at some examples to see where this feature can help and how to read the data.
Example 1.
This timetable passed the test, so it is possible to generate each single teacher/class/subject or room. But it is still not possible to generate the whole timetable. One card constantly gets left out. One may say that this is because it is Physical education and it simply hard to place it. So the first attempt was to try to generate on harder complexity. But this hasn't helped - the timetable still cannot be generated.
So we run "Analyze by Generation" to see if it can help:
After a minute the software shows the same timetable in different colors:
Red cards are hard, white cards have caused no problem. We can see that there is a group of red cards in classes 704, 705 and 707. Also one of the cards at the bottom is in red. Clearly there is something wrong not with just that PE card, but also with all the cards of teacher "Chloe". It is not possible to place the last Chloe's card because she either already teaches on that position, or kids are not available because they are having PE. There are 29 positions per week but 3 positions are blocked by PE. You cannot put in Chloe's lessons on these position, because all the kids have PE. So the result is that there are 26 positions for Chloe's lessons. But Chloe has 27 lessons in these classes. There is no way around this, you either need to split PE or move at least one of the Chloe's lessons to other class. So using Analyze we have found that there is no problem with PE lesson, the problem is in Chloe's contract combined with PE lesson.
Example 2
Running timetable/Analyze by generations, shows these cards in red:
So we go back to the original colors:
and then check these lessons:
It is immediately clear that these cards cannot be placed into the timetable because one group in each grade is joined and the other groups that have to be in the same time are taught by the same teacher. Again, this is problem in the input and there is no way to do the timetable until it is fixed.