Work plan for rehabilitation offices with different length of classes

[Hypno]

Hi,
I would like to ask about the possibility of creating a lesson plan for a clinic where therapists work with children.
General specification:
1. The clinic has 3 locations, each with a maximum of 5 classes.
2. About 100 children attend the clinic,
3. About 20 therapists work in the clinic.
4. Normal working hours are 8:00 to 19:00 Monday to Friday (some exceptions).
5. Classes always start at 8:00 am but end as needed.
6. Classes are always arranged in such a way that one child has classes with one therapist in the room. There is never more than 1 child and one therapist in one room at the same time.
7. There is a small list of types of activities to be carried out, e.g. speech therapy, sensory ... (equivalent to school lessons such as math, physics, etc.).
8. Each therapist can only perform certain types of activities, usually one type, but sometimes 2 or 3 types depending on the qualifications they have.
9. There are defined breaks between successive classes, e.g. 5 minutes
or longer if, for example, the therapist or the child had to move between remote locations.

When a child is admitted to the clinic, his needs are determined. For example, there will be a total of 6 hours of classes per month, of which 3 hours of type A, 1.5 hours of type B and 1.5 hours of type C. Then a therapist is assigned to each type of activity (generally, this therapist will always lead classes of this type with this child, substitutions are really exceptional in extreme situations). Thus, the first significant difference to a typical school is the fact that the length of therapeutic classes may vary from 20 minutes to even 2 hours (always a multiple of 5 minutes). This is determined individually for each child. Sometimes there are siblings among children. This must also be included in the schedule so that, for example, the brothers do not have classes at the same time (the parent participates in the classes) and that the parent does not have breaks between the classes of the first and second child (and maybe the third). Children actually never have more than one activity in one day. Because these are children with deficits, it is extremely important. It is preferable to spread classes evenly throughout the month with a certain routine, i.e. it would be good if, for example, classes for a given child were always held on Thursdays between 12:00 and 13:30.

In addition, restrictions such as which therapist can work on what days of the week and at what times are quite typical in such cases, and similarly for children (actually for their parents). Who goes on vacation when, when there are some extra days off from classes, who prefers the morning and who the afternoon, and everyone doesn't like windows between classes.

At the moment, for my wife, who deals with creating such plans, I made a very complicated (complicated in terms of formulas and functions) spreadsheet in OpenOffice. But of course, the main work is done by her gray cells :-) The process of creating graphics usually takes 3 long days, and then the nightmare begins when the parent happily announces that they forgot to say that then they are going on vacation.... and changes are made sometimes ruining existing arrangements. Altogether, arranging such a graphic from start to finish takes about a week of time and non-stop ringing phones, who doesn't like what.

So, finally, I ask the question, could I help my wife in her work with this FET, taking into account the above-described specificity?

Greetings from Poland
Piotr

[Volker Dirr]

hmmm... good question.

If you do this planning, are these activites repeated reagularly ever week. Or are there rules like "repeat it the first 2 weeks every day. But in week 2 to 4 repeat it only 2 times per week. And in week 5 and 6 do it only a single time in the week."? I fear a bit you have rules like the second one and that might be complicated to enter in FET.

Most of your points shouldn't be a problem, but i fear there are 2 points (you didn't wrote, but i fear there are this 2 points) that make it difficult (or impossible?) with FET, since they are different from normal schools.

In normal schools in best case you are planing only one week and this week is just repeated many time.
In more difficult schools you are maybe planning more days. FET support up to 1000 days. But after this there is a clear cut for all teachers and students. But I fear in your case there is never a clean cut. There are always overlapping therapys with children, since you don't have got something like sommer holiday to start with a clean data set once again, don't you?
But with FET you are forced to do a cut after currently 1000 days. This limit can be increased, but i fear you will get an other disadvanatged if we incease that limit: You always need to keep old data. So your data set will grow pretty much and i fear it will become much too confusing after some time.
hmm... i fear in that case FET might "only" need the feature to "delete" old days and "add" new days. But currently FET can't delete the "first" day. It only "renames" the day. So that will be a problem. But this might be fixed. Liviu, what do you think about this point?

The second point is, that you maybe do the planning for the next 6 weeks (i don't know. i just guess that number. Maybe you also do it for only 3 weeks or maybe for even 50 weeks. That is no problem, since FET support up to 1000 days. But the difference to schools is, that you maybe add 1 days later the activities for 5 other new childs. And again 1 day later you add the activities for another new child. And maybe 2 days later you add the activities for 2 other new children. So you always need to add new activities for new children. It is not like a school. It is possible with FET, but in fact it might be a problem.

Maybe i am wrong. What do you think about this 2 points i wrote about?
If they are needed, then i fear FET is not designed for your needs.

But maybe just try it. Let us know what is missing for your situation.

[Hypno]

Planning is always for the next month. And within a month, the schedule of classes must be implemented.
Assuming that I have 100 children and each of them has 6 activities (that's the maximum) then I have 600 activities in total that I have to plan within a month. Of course, each of these 600 classes has a designated therapist and the duration is from 20 minutes to a maximum of 2 hours. I think that in my case I will never reach 1000 classes.
Work on arranging the schedule looks like this:
1. Take the current list of children for the next month.
2. For each child, indicate a specific (as in the plan or in the previous month) list of activities. Let's say a child is to have a total of 4 hours of classes, of which 2 hours of class A, 1 hour of class B and 1 hour of class C. So in this case, there will be 3 elements (therapies) for this child.
3. For each type of activity for a specific child, assign a therapist (from the plan established at the beginning for each child for the duration of the entire therapy).
4. Each of the above blocks, which has the fields CHILD, THERAPIST, TYPE OF CLASSES, LENGTH OF CLASSES, enter in the plan. Some types of classes must be conducted in a specific room due to the rehabilitation equipment. As a result, each of these blocks will receive additional data: DATE (day of the month), START TIME, END TIME, ROOM NUMBER.

Point 4 then must take into account the possibilities and preferences of therapists and parents of children and of course common sense.


I would be grateful for a hint (scenario) on how to try to solve the problem, I haven't used your program yet (it was suggested to me yesterday by Chat GPT ;-) )
So in points:
1. Enter the list of children in the menu....
2. Enter the list of therapists in the menu...
3. Enter the list of rooms in the menu ...
4. Assign ..... something to something ....

[Volker Dirr]

hmm.. yes. Maybe try it.

1. You can add the student names as "year" names.
2. You can add the therapists names as teachers.
3. Rooms are Rooms (Space constraints)
4. I think you should use the FET "subject" as ?"TYPE OF CLASSES"?

Not sure about the day.
i think the best is just to call them "1", "2", "3", ...
Maybe use the break constraint to mark Sundays and Saturday (i guess you don't work on that days)

[Hypno]

I'm going to try today or tomorrow for the first try.

And another question from another side, will I find somewhere a description of the algorithm that creates the plan? I would love to get acquainted with it, because maybe I could introduce some automaton in my sheet.
I also have a great desire to experiment with the topic and neural networks.

[Volker Dirr]

The algorithm is released under AGPL License.
So if you want read and party use it, then you need to release your source under the AGPL License.

If you agree with AGPL License, then just have a look into the source generate.cpp
We can of course explain more detailed.

If you don't agree with AGPL License, then you sadly can't use it in your software.