Troubleshooting Guide for Error -100050

If you're seeing a score of "-100050" (that's a negative number) for one of your generated schedules, it means that the scheduling engine is working to ensure that students in each session do not mix categories under Topic #1.

If the scheduler completed with this error code (i.e. you see the text "Did not find any solutions" in the Stage column), then this article describes the next steps you should take.  (For background, you may also want to check out Why didn't the engine find any results?.)

If the scheduler is still running (i.e. you see the text "Solving (4 of 6)" in the Stage column), and it's been stuck on this error code for a while (i.e. over an hour), you might want to take corrective action right now. There's a small chance that your caseload will still produce viable schedules before the end of its computation window, but it's not looking good. This article describes the next steps you should take.

Reduce "Hard" Constraints

If your caseload has too many "hard" constraints, then it will severely slow down the scheduler. In fact, it may slow down so much that it will take weeks or months for the supercomputers to find a solution.  More info.

If this is happening to you, you may either:

  • Remove the "hard" constraints altogether
  • Replace the "hard" constraints with "soft" constraints.  More info.

Generally speaking, please reconsider any self-imposed constraints. Some of your constraints come from your state's laws, or from policies that your administration has put in place. If any of the constraints you've entered are really your own preferences, try removing them. The scheduler works best when the only hard constraints are the ones that are absolutely necessary.

Here are some suggestions for your caseload:

  • Reconsider whether each student with a specified "Category under Topic #1" value could actually be mixed with students having other "Category under Topic #1" values.  For all students in this scenario, simply select the blank value for "Category under Topic #1".
  • Remove exact time spans from students in your caseload
  • Don't schedule your sessions in alignment with class periods
  • Remove any non-critical "Must Not" entries for every student in your caseload, or convert them to "Prefer Not" entries

The easiest way to do some of these things is to use one of the following "Caseload Transformations" on your caseload page:

  • Remove exact time spans
  • Convert student "Must Not" entries
  • Convert "Must" groupings
  • Do all reversible transformations
  • The Nuclear Option

However, you can also make manual changes to your caseload to make the updates yourself.

After removing or replacing some/all of your hard constraints, try scheduling again.

Manually Partition

If you have multiple therapists in your caseload, consider using Topic #1 as a convenient way to manually partition your single caseload into two separate caseloads--one caseload per therapist.  Then, each therapist could be scheduled separately--and more quickly.  More info.

If you'd like help partitioning, please contact Support.  We can easily duplicate your exact caseload (one for each therapist), which saves you the effort of having to manually reenter any data.  Simply remove the students handled by the other caseload, and click the big green "Schedule" button again on both caseloads.

Last Resort

If you've already done these things, and are still having trouble, please follow the generic instructions here.

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Historical notes:

  • In previous versions of the scheduler, this was known as error -100220.

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