After finalising the input, use this button to go into the graphical planning module. Here, Houses can assigned to Courses and Participants to Houses (all represented by circles) in an intuitive, interactive and graphical manner.
Make your own plan, or select one of the ten seating arrangement solutions as optimised by our algorithms.
Use this button to define what kind of “Special Relations” can exist between Participants, such as “Avoid meeting…”, etc.
Further down in the workflow, these Relations can be used to define which Participant-couples the Planner should try to avoid (or promote) putting together at the same table.
When all required data has been entered into the system (at minimum: Participants and Houses), a seating arrangement can be created. To this end, press the Go button to freeze the input and enable the Graphical Planning functionality accessible through the buttons at the bottom of the screen.
When the input needs to be changed, for example because some Participants, Houses and/or Courses need to be added or removed, the Change input needs to be pressed. Note that this will void all results calculated thus far.
Click the button for more info.
Optional. Default: no Special Relations
Use this button to specify whether any Special Relation exists between any two participants.
Use this button to define which Participants and which Houses take part in the Running Dinner. At minimum, unique names and unique addresses should be input. Every House can have multiple Participants. Although not required, it is possible to input Gender, e-mail, dietary requirements, and short Names and Addresses.
Click the button for more info.
Optional. Default: Course 1, 2 & 3.
Use this button to define how many Courses should be served and what they should be called, and how many Hosts should ideally be present (default: 1) when serving a Course.
Use this button to specify which of the Participants living at an Address should be considered to be a Host who must be present when that House serves a Course.
Click the button for more info.
Optional. Default: default penalties
The Planner uses a ‘penalty’ system to gauge the quality of a seating arrangement is. Found arrangements are evaluated based on the penalties associated with, for example, participants that meet more than once, houses not serving their preferred dish, unbalanced male/female ratio at tables, etc. The value of these penalties can be changed by the user so as to steer the operation of the Planner in a desired direction. This is an advanced feature that should be handled with care.
When a suitable seating arrangement has been found, press this button to start generating custom-designed and personalised invitations for both Participants as well as Hosts. This functionality also creates a plain-text description of the seating arrangement.
