space constrains

[silvia]

hi all,
I'd like to make a suggestion according rooms and space constrains. I got wonderful timetables that assigned a classroom to each activity according to the space constrains I defined. The problem was with activities with more than one teacher or more than one classroom. It didn't generate any classroom, or only one. I know I can always add empty activities with only space and time constrains, but then these classrooms won't appear in the teachers' or students' timetable. I had to add almost all classrooms by hand in the html file. Any suggestion?


also, any possibility of turning on and off the -x- in the spots of teacher's not available times?



thanks a bunch for the wonderful program.

[Liviu Lalescu]

hi all,
I'd like to make a suggestion according rooms and space constrains. I got wonderful timetables that assigned a classroom to each activity according to the space constrains I defined. The problem was with activities with more than one teacher or more than one classroom. It didn't generate any classroom, or only one. I know I can always add empty activities with only space and time constrains, but then these classrooms won't appear in the teachers' or students' timetable. I had to add almost all classrooms by hand in the html file. Any suggestion?

For activities with more rooms: it would be very difficult to take care of all constraints same starting time and come up with a list of rooms for a certain activity and print that. The reason is that same starting time might have weight <100.0%, also maybe others don't want to print all rooms of all simultaneous activities to be printed in each teacher's timetable. Maybe I didn't understand correctly the problem, so please correct me if so.

For activities with more teachers: I am sorry, but I do not understand correctly the problem. Are you referring that if an activity has more than one teacher, the home rooms are not respected? You could add a constraint activity preferred room in this case for each activity. I cannot respect home rooms for activities with more teachers, because I might obtain impossible timetables.

also, any possibility of turning on and off the -x- in the spots of teacher's not available times?

We'll make an option for that, in future versions. Meanwhile, please open the html file with a text editor and select "Edit/Replace" and replace -x- with ---.

[silvia]

thanks for the quick answer

what I mean about rooms I'll try to explain with an example.

I want groups 4A 4B and 4C to have Maths at the same time with 3 different teachers. This is because we teach maths at different levels (same with many other subjects), so we need to "remix" the students from those 3 groups. So I do 1 activity:

3 hours a week, teacher1, teacher2, teacher3, group 4A, 4B, 4C.


I have a space constrain where home room for 4A is classroom 16, home for 4B is classroom 17 and home for 4C is classroom 18.

This is great for activities with 1 group and 1 teacher. As you said, the percentage f time constrains won't give any room to that activity. But it would be nice to assign the 3 home rooms (or any free rooms) to that activity. This way I would get a tietable with:

monday 8.00 4A-maths with teacher 1, 2 and 3 in classrooms 16-17-18
wednesday 11.00 4A-maths with teacher 1, 2 and 3 in classrooms 16-17-18
etc

some students from 4A, some from 4B and some from 4C would be in classroom 16 having a low level of maths with teacher1

some students from 4A, som from 4B and some from 4C would be in classroom 17 having a mid level of maths with teacher2

etc.


I don't know if I made myself clear, as English is not my mother tongue.

thank you  

[Liviu Lalescu]

OK, I understood.

It is very difficult to parse the FET file and watch for situations like yours.

A solution is to divide years according to Math level. Then you'll have each activity with its own room (I am not sure here if you need to add a preferred room for some activities). But if you obtained a good timetable, this is a bit complicated and not worth it.

An ugly trick :-)  : add room "R1 R2 R3" (so a single room has name of 3 rooms" and constrain the activity to take place in this room (activity preferred room).

[Volker Dirr]

An ugly trick :-)  : add room "R1 R2 R3" (so a single room has name of 3 rooms" and constrain the activity to take place in this room (activity preferred room).

Be careful with this trick if you also need R1, R2 and R3 separately (so if you still have a room "R1", room "R2" and room "R3", because in that case you need to care about that R1, R2 and R3 are not used if room "R1 R2 R3" is used.

[silvia]

you are both right. it would be a good solution, but we also need yhose rooms separately for other activities, only not at the same time. I had thought about adding the activities separately and making them begin at the same time. I'm not sure if that would work.

activity1: teacher1, 4ABC, classrom1, maths1 (or something like this. but then again, FET wouldn't recognise 4ABC as 4A and the students' timetable wouldn't be complete. I would have to add the activities by hand in their timetable.

Do you think it would be possible to solve this by assigning a set of 3 preferred rooms to that activity? would that be a conflict with the same classroom being the home classroom of 4A?

[Liviu Lalescu]

I meant to have rooms R1, R2, R3 and dummy "R1+R2+R3" - this last one only for special activities.

You can add home rooms for S1->R1, S2->R2, S3->R3 and preferred room(s) of A(S1, S2, S3) to be R1 (or R1, R2, R3, or "R1+R2+R3"). If you add 3 preferred rooms, R1, R2, R3, then FET will put A only in one of them - so you don't like it. Maybe add dummy preferred room R1+R2+R3. This was my idea.

Preferred rooms override home rooms. So if you have preferred room for an activity (or subject), you can forget about home rooms constraints for this activity.

Please experiment a bit and let us know the results.