schedule

[hosny]

I have tried several several attempts at building a schedule relationally based on specific criteria and hope you guys can offer some possible methods. I have a file called contest with data in a field called school and a layout with several choices like start/end time, lunch break, limit per school per room, etc. Here are the two main criteria: a school has a limited number of participants per room (say 10) and it cannot perform at the same time in different rooms (school A performs at 8:30 in room 1, but cannot perform at 8:30 in room 2). So say we have 100 entries and three schools with numbers 50, 30, and 20. If our contest is 8:30-5:30 with an hour break, there are 68 slots per room. Only 10 from each school can be in the same room, so theoretically school one will be in 5 rooms, school two, 3, and school three 2, and they can't perform at the same time. I know that some schools will bring more than the number of possible members, and we'll have some cross over, which I don't know how to factor that into a formula. I tried to create a relational file that pre-assigned times, and assigned a school to each time using loops and set fields, but this failed.

Any ideas or suggestions? Has anyone created a schedule with some parameters?

Thanks for your help,

Hoz