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2015-12-22:

Note: Text covers an earlier version.

Course Assignment

Updated: 2015-12-22

A leg in a class has an ordered set of courses. These are assigned to the competitors, rolling, by start number.

Example

Suppose there are three courses, A, B and C. Runner 1 gets course A, runner 2 course B, runner 3 course C, runner 4 course A, runner 5 course B, and so on. To fork a relay with thre legs and three courses, you can assign courses ABC to leg 1, BCA to leg 2, and CAB to leg 3.

But this is not optimal. You will get more out of the forking if you put ABCABC on leg 1, BCACAB on leg 2 and CABBCA on leg 3. Then there are six possible orders to run the course: ABC, BCA, CAB, ACB, BAC, and CBA. These are all possible orders over three courses.

Dynamically Tied Courses

If you check Use course pool, the forking will not be locked until the competitor finishes. MeOS will then select a course, from the set of courses specified on the leg, that matches the punches in the card. This assignment is made independently for each runner, and no check is made that the team as a whole has run all forkings.

If instead you check Out of order parallel legs, MeOS will allow that within a team and for each group of parallel legs, any competitor can have any of the team's forkings.

For example, if leg 3 is parallel with four different courses (and four runners), it will not matter which of the runners take which course. However, MeOS will check that all the specified courses are run, only a different order is allowed.

Defining Forkings

The function Define Forking lets you easily construct an optimal forking key based on the courses you have. Select a number of course variants, the legs that should use these courses and then click Assign Selected Courses to Selected Legs. If other legs are supposed to use a different set of courses, you have to repeat this procedure until all legs has the right set of courses assigned. Then you click Calculate and Apply Forking. MeOS computes an optimal forking key from the courses; the result is best of the courses are forked with each other with certain common controls.

If you want to view the complete forking schemes for the teams as units, click Show Forking. You will also get further information if unfairness is detected. On the page Lists there is a list with the course assignment. For each competitor you see the assigned course.
Hint
On the page Lists there is also a list with a table format. Copy this list and past it into a word processor or spreadsheet program to create labels with bib, course and leg, suitable to label maps.

Comments

Even use of forks

2017-11-11 23:00:24 av Henrik Poulsen

I'm using MeOS version 3.4.782 U2

Having a competetion with forked courses, ie:
1: Course 1: BABA
2: Course 1: ABBA
3: Course 1: BAAB
4: Course 1: ABAB

For each fork i have printet 8 maps = total 32 maps.

When i import 25 runners to the competetion they are distributed uneven on the forks, ie:
1: Course 1: BABA 7 runners
2: Course 1: ABBA 9 runners
3: Course 1: BAAB 4 runners
4: Course 1: ABAB 5 runners

How do i get the runners even distributed with a max. of 8 runners on each fork?

Next (or same issue) question:
In one of the classes D5/H5 i have 5 D5 runners and 9 H5 runners - all the D5 runners are assigned the same forking - how do i make MeOS use both forks in the D5 class?

I am aware that i just can change the course (forking) og each runner - but i want MeOS to do the work ;)

Greetings

//Henrik, FIF Hillerød Orientering

Fork assignment

2017-11-12 15:24:58 av Erik Melin

MeOS makes no promise about even distribution of courses. In fact, depending on how the forks are setup, it might even not be possible in the following sense: if you maximize the number of combinations (which MeOS does) even if there is arbitrary many teams, the distribution might not be even.

If there are fewer teams than the number of possible team forkings, the situation is even more random. MeOS randomizes the course usage, but makes not effort to optimize if for a certain number of teams.

What you can do is to edit the course list for each leg, and remove lines with course variants that you wish to avoid.



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