Adjusting Depth in Schedule Properties

by Paul Ziino

So you ran the Automatic Scheduler in your data and when you review
and edit the log, you see MusicMaster left a few positions
unscheduled. Now the question is, why? Ultimately, the answer is
because no song in the available depth passed all the unbreakable
rules, thus MusicMaster was unable to fill that position.

So now you go to that unscheduled position, double-click on it to
open the list of replacements, and you see a number of options that
pass the unbreakable rules. So now the question is, why didn't
MusicMaster fill this position with one of these songs?

The answer, as indicated before, no song in the available depth
passed all the unbreakable rules. What does this mean? It means
that even though some songs in the category passed those unbreakable
rules, those weren't the songs being tested at the time MusicMaster
was auto-scheduling that position.

Your depths are set in Schedule Properties (Dataset/Schedule/Schedule
Properties). The depth is the number of songs that MusicMaster can
look at when searching for a song to schedule. If you have 100
songs/slots in the category, and the depth is set at 10, this means
MusicMaster looks at the next 10 songs in the 'stack', and if none
passes the unbreakable rules, the position is left unscheduled.

If you are consistently getting unscheduled positions in the log for
a given category, but you see songs that pass the unbreakable rules
when editing those positions, it's a good idea to try increasing the
category's depth in Schedule Properties. So in that category of 100
with a depth of 10, had we increased that depth to 15, MusicMaster
would have tested 5 more songs. So if song 12 in the stack passed
the unbreakable rules it would have been auto-scheduled.

The idea here is to make sure your depths are deep enough to allow
the program to find a song to auto-schedule, but not so deep that
it's testing songs unnecessarily. A little trial and error will help
you find the right depth for each category.