Timetable spread and lattice energies

Extract

In [1] the author investigated a method of measuring how good the spread of lessons is for a class in a school timetable. The method considered only the maximum number of days between two consecutive lessons. However, it was observed that not all configurations with the same maximum gap are equally good. For example, the configuration for a tenday cycle in Figure 1(a) would be preferable to that in Figure 1(b); the filled circles represent days with a lesson and the unfilled circles days without. Here we propose a model that takes into account the overall configuration when measuring how good the spread of lessons is.