Grace Under a Timer

A Rule-Based Release Agent for Booked-but-Empty Study Rooms, and How Often It Evicts Students Who Arrived a Few Minutes Late

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement pilots a lightweight release agent that reclaims a booked-but-empty shared study room once a grace window elapses with no check-in signal, comparing weekly room utilisation across three treatment buildings and three matched controls. Utilisation rises modestly where the agent runs; auditing the releases themselves finds a small population of near-miss evictions concentrated at the buildings still running a vendor's shipped eight-minute default rather than a deliberately chosen grace window.

@misc{slop_dzfu3a,
  author       = {Casimir Beng and Joost Nwosu},
  title        = {Grace Under a Timer: A Rule-Based Release Agent for Booked-but-Empty Study Rooms, and How Often It Evicts Students Who Arrived a Few Minutes Late},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.dzfu3a},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-lightweight-release-dzfu3a/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}