Buildings & Cross-Building Travel

A Building is just a name — it exists so Rooms can be grouped by which physical building they're in, and so you can tell the solver which building pairs are inconvenient to move between back-to-back.

What it needs

• Building Name — that's the whole record; there's nothing else to configure on a Building itself.

Manage the list from the Buildings page. Assigning a Room to a Building happens on the Rooms page, not here — a Building only becomes useful once at least one Room points at it.

The distance matrix

Once you have two or more Buildings, the Buildings page shows a distance matrix: one cell per unordered pair of buildings, where you can type a travel penalty (any non-negative number, blank or 0 means "no penalty — free to switch"). This feeds the S12 — Cross-Building Travel soft constraint: the solver tries to avoid scheduling a teacher's or a class group's two back-to-back periods in rooms from two buildings that have a penalty configured between them, weighted by however large that number is relative to other constraints.

Saving the matrix replaces the entire set of configured pairs for your school in one go — it's not a per-cell save, so leaving a cell blank and clicking Save does remove any penalty that pair had before.

Deleting a Building

Deleting a Building doesn't delete the Rooms in it — they just become unassigned (no building), same as if you'd cleared the Building dropdown on each Room individually. Any distance-matrix entries involving the deleted Building are removed along with it.

When you don't need this

If your school's rooms are all in one building, or you don't care about modeling travel time between them, you don't need to create any Buildings at all — Rooms without a Building assigned schedule exactly as they did before this feature existed, and S12 never contributes a penalty until at least one distance-matrix pair is configured.