History

Managing Testbed Reservations

This section provides information about making, modifying, and cencelling reservations.

How to make a reservation

Reservations can be made on the OMF Scheduler page. To make a reservation, follow these steps:

  1. Click the Scheduler link available in the index on the left of the page. A login and password are required to access this page. Once, you supply your login ID and password, the Scheduler page is displayed.
  2. To reserve a resource, first navigate to the table for the day on which you wish to make the reservation. You can advance the calendar by using navigation links at the bottom of the page. You cannot reserve a resource for a date/time that has passed or the one for which you don't have permission.
  3. Once you have located the table for the required day, click on the time slot you want to use as a start time of your resource reservation. The New Reservation form showing the details of the reservation is displayed.
  4. Select the Start Time and End Time for the reservation. You can select a mimimum of 30 minutes or a maximum of two hours per request.
  5. Click Save. A message confirming your booking is displayed. The main scheduler table is updated with the newly created reservation slot in yellow colour indicating that it is in the "pending approval" state. Also, the email notification on the reservation is sent to your registered email address.

Reservation slots are approved by the scheduling service based on the two stage approval policy. Reservation approval process is a two-stage process. In the first (pre-approval) stage, scheduling requests received before noon will be pre-approved for the following day.
Example: If it is Tuesday morning before noon, and you request for 4 to 6 in the evening Wednesday, you will know for sure whether you have this time by 2:00 P.M. on Tuesday.

How to modify a reservation

To modify the reservation, follow these steps:

  1. Locate your time slot that you want to modify. Click on it. The Modify Reservation form is displayed.
  2. Select a different Start Time and End Time for your reservation.
  3. Click Modify. A message to confirm your change is displayed. Click Yes to proceed, or No to cancel. Another window confirming the change is displayed. Click the Close link.
    An email message with the updated reservation is sent to your email address.

If you wish to cancel the existing reservation, and make a reservation for a different day, you must first delete the current reservation and then make a new one.

How to delete a reservation

To delete a reservation, follow these steps:
  1. Locate your time slot that you want to delete and click on it. The Modify Reservation form is displayed.
  2. Select Delete by clicking on it. The Delete checkbox is located below the Summary field.
  3. Click Modify. A message to confirm your change is displayed. Click Yes to proceed, or No to cancel. Another window confirming the change is displayed. Click the Close link.
    An email message with the information about about the deleted reservation is sent to your email address.
    You can now make a new reservation on the Scheduler page, as described in the How to make a reservation section above.

Conflicts

It is possible to request for a particular slot even if another user has already reserved it. The procedure is the same as for requesting an empty slot except that the resulting colour changes to red once there are multiple simultaneous (conflicting) reservations as shown in Figure x.
Conflicts will be resolved based on how much time the requester has already used over the past two weeks (from the current reservation date). Those who have used less time on the in the last two weeks will be more likely to have their requests approved for the conflicting slots.
Due to the complexity of the conflict resolution algorithm, it is recommended to refrain from conflicting on slots that are less than two hours in the future since just-in-time approval process will not try to resolve conflicts.