Planeco

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Inspiration

Planeco was born on a snowy Friday night in a small university residence room in Montreal. While all our friends were out partying, we stayed in and brainstormed to figure out what we were going to design for the 11th codeJam hackathon. After hours of tossing and turning, we came up with the idea that was going to change the way companies think their schedule building: Planeco.

What it does

Planeco is a smart schedule builder allowing companies to adapt themselves to the great challenges of our time: climate change, pandemics, cost of real estate… The user can create as many workspaces as he wants, each one having its own name, maximum capacity and an optional occupation gauge. The goal of our program is to help the manager make a schedule when disposing of a limited space in the company’s facilities compared to the number of employees. Each employee of the company enters their name, the number of days where they must be present at the workspace, the days where they are available to come work in presence as well as their traveling time to reach the workspace and their mean of transport. The algorithm then generates a schedule respecting the daily capacity limit. The first slots are given to the workers who indicated that they needed to be present at the workshop on a given day. The remaining slots are then attributed to the workers depending on their priority index, which is calculated based on the environmental impact of their mean of transport, their time of transit to reach the workspace, the number of slots that they have already been granted and the days they claimed to be available for in-person work.

When the schedule for the given workspace is generated, a table associating each day with the names of the employees that have been granted an in-person slot on that day. The user can also view a personal weekly schedule for each registered worker.

In the end, we believe this website will allow a lot of time gain when making schedules. It will also make sure that the carbon footprint of the company is optimized. Moreover, the mental wellness and the comfort of the employees is pampered as their time constraints and workday preferences are taken into account when building the schedule. Finally, a swift turnover between employees is organized to make sure that the schedule meets everyone’s needs at best.

How we built it

We based our project on the python flask framework that serves as a link between html pages and python programs. We started by designing a robust and efficient python algorithm for the schedule distribution, which we then implemented in the website using flask.

Challenges we ran into

The flask framework can sometimes be a bit confusing especially as it manages data flows in both directions (from the python program to the html files and from the html files to the python program (via forms)). Parsing the csv files to match our data structure was also a bit tricky. Finally, keeping our brains working despite the lack of sleep was probably the biggest challenge we faced (after trying to make the uber coupon work ;).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We spent a lot of time developing the GUI and algorithm, and we are proud of the functionalities we were able to implement given the time constraint.

What we learned

We learned a lot about web page styling (css), algorithm building, as well as web planning.

What's next for Planeco

We aim to continue developing the website, possibly adding more functionalities and making the website public.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• python