Recommended way of modeling bi-weekly activities

[math]

Hi!

A colleague would like to use FET for his timetabling problem. He is responsible for generating a schedule in his department. Unfortunately they have some modules that are planned on a bi-weekly basis. In even weeks he has to plan lectures for these modules, in odd weeks he has to plan exercises.

Since I have no experience on modeling bi-weekly activities in FET, I used the search function of this forum. Unfortunately I did not find that much. The postings I found were some years old and recommended to model bi-weekly activities by configuring twice the number of days (5 days for even weeks, 5 days for odd weeks).

Is this way of modeling bi-weekly activities still the current state of art? Or is there a more elegant way of modeling it?

Best, Matthias

[Liviu Lalescu]

Hello, Matthias,

First, a correction: "fortnightly" activities is the term, not "bi-weekly". You might want to search the forum also for this, and also the FAQ (there is a question/answer there).

Recently, there are certainly better solution than doubling the days. Depending on the data, your friend could:

1) Just add the lecture and exercise in the same activity (for all such special activities).

2) Double the students and consider a students set to be for lectures and its pair to be for exercises (and all students have the other basic activities). I did something similar for someone in Romania about a year ago and it worked (she had to minimize the gaps for the students).

The approach in my method (2) could be automated, depending on what data he has.

If your friend is interested in more help or customization, which would imply custom code or modifying the input data, I could offer specialized help into analyzing his data file and customizing FET, on a contract base. Other solutions might appear as we look on it.

[Volker Dirr]

Maybe also read this:
https://www.timetabling.de/manual/FET-manual.en.html#id_36