How to approach this process?

[QB]

I am hoping someone can give me some guidance on how to approach a process.

I have a list of lecturers with windows of availabilities and then I have a
second list of attendees which is in fact a listing of individuals and which
lecturers they wish to meet with and when they will be in attendance.

I need to automate access to loop through the attendees lisiting to generate
a schedule of attendees per lecturer based on this. Any ideas??

Thank you,

QB

 

[Tom van Stiphout]

On Sat, 22 May 2010 19:25:01 -0700, QB <[email protected]>
wrote:

Interesting problem. You will need to specify the requirements more
rigorously. For example is it a requirement that the student request
fits ENTIRELY in the teacher's availability? You will also have to
decide how far you want to go with optimizations. Example:
teacher1 is available from 8a - 12p
student1 wants 8a-9a
student2 wants 9a-12p
student3 wants 8a-12p
Would you rather schedule student1 and 2 in this time, or student3?
Why?

You may discover that there are many possible solutions, and you need
some way to bubble the best one to the surface. That's decidedly
non-trivial and could be hard to solve in the general case. If you dig
in some more, you may find this is an NP-complete problem, meaning it
is solvable, but not necessarily by brute force because that would
take too long. The trick is to understand the problem really well, and
use the extra information to develop shortcuts. "Genetic algorithms"
are suitable to solve these problems, but again, not for the faint of
heart.

I worked on a similar problem recently: from a pool of N available
examiners assign them to M positions at the exam. You can use simple
math to calculate the number of Combinations (NOT permutations) and
find out when you are in the danger zone and what you have to do to
get back to values of N and M that can be computed in reasonable
amount of time.

-Tom.
Microsoft Access MVP