This article provides a comprehensive overview of Schedule Optimization in Opus1.io. Schedule optimization is a feature designed to minimize gaps in teachers' schedules and prioritize appointment availability slots accordingly.
The purpose of this article is to explain how schedule optimization works and how it determines which appointment availability slots to display at self-booking when enabled.
The goal of schedule optimization is to minimize gaps in your teachers' schedules. Therefore, it prioritizes slots that will close gaps between already-scheduled lessons.
To enable schedule optimization for an appointment service, click Update on the service from the Services page, then navigate to the Calendar settings section under the General tab. Click the Edit button (the pencil icon).
- Schedule optimization strategy - select "minimize gaps" and Opus will identify and prioritize availability slots that will minimize gaps in your teachers' schedules and display those prioritized slots at Book Appointment.
- Enforce schedule optimization for self-booking - when enabled, will hide all availability slots except those with highest priority.
- Max scheduling gap - specifies how many minutes before/after an already-scheduled lesson that a new lesson may be booked. E.g. when set to 0 minutes, lessons may only be self-booked either immediately before and/or after existing lessons.
Availability Slot Prioritization
Opus1.io assigns the highest priority to slots between existing lessons when schedule optimization is enabled and enforced for self-booking.
In the below example, schedule optimization is enabled and enforced with a max scheduling gap of 0 minutes.
The two staff below have multiple availabilities on the date shown. However, only slots between existing lessons will be assigned the highest priority.
Therefore the following slots are available on the same date for self-booking:
However, when there are no availability slots between existing lessons, highest priority will be given to availability slots that are immediately before or after existing lessons and fall within the specified max scheduling gap.
In the example below, our staff only have availability before their existing appointments:
Therefore the following slots are shown at self-booking:
Setting The Max Scheduling Gap
The Max Scheduling Gap allows you to adjust the schedule optimization algorithm's tolerance for self-booked appointments to create gaps in your staff's teaching schedules.
In the example below, there is a large block of availability, and the max scheduling gap for that service is set to 0 minutes.
However, when we adjust the max scheduling gap to 30 minutes, more availability slots are shown at self-booking:
In the example above, an appointment booked in the 2:15-3:15 PM slot would create a 30-minute gap between itself and the lesson scheduled at 3:45 PM.