Hi,
I just started to use FET. I have a very elementary question. My test problem is very simple: one teacher, two student groups each corresponding to one activity that meets once per week for one period, two rooms, both big enough to hold either groups. Only the basic compulsory constraints for time and space are set. Then of course a timetable is generated immediately. But the problem is that the room assignment is not shown anywhere. How can I get FET to tell me the location of each activity?
Thank you very much,
alin
that room constraint only care about the other rooms constraints.
so you must add at least one more room constraint.
please read:
http://www.timetabling.de/manual/FET-manual.en.html#id_46
and / or
http://www.timetabling.de/manual/FET-manual.en.html#id_29
Thanks but I'm still a little confused. Do you mean that each activity must have a (set of) preferred room(s) or the teacher/students related in that activity must have home room or preferred rooms?
Consider the following scenario: say I have about 100 activities and 50 rooms. There are some time requirements but no room requirements. In other words, I don't care which room is assigned to which activity as long as each activity gets a room and no two activities will be in the same room at the same period. In this case, do I have to add all rooms as preferred room for each activity? This seems a bit inconvenient because I think that an activity having no preferred room should imply that all rooms are OK for that activity.
Do I understand it correctly?
Thank you,
alin
Quote from: alin on September 05, 2013, 06:53:24 PMI don't care which room is assigned to which activity as long as each activity gets a room and no two activities will be in the same room at the same period.
I understand your request, but for nearly all schools this is incorrect.
Because no school do math in the sport gym, physics in the art room, sport in the chemistry lab, ...
so normaly you do at least subject preferred room constraints.
if you are one of the rare school that don't have to care about that, then you can do 2 things:
a) check the number of (years, groups ans subgroups that are assigned to activities), the number of teachers and the number of subjects. choose the lowest number. Now add room constraints to these. (So normaly even schools with over 1000 students have less then 15 subjects. so you need to add only 15 constraints.)
or
b)
add an acttivity tag to each activity. maybe call it "room". then you only need to add a single room constraint to that activity tag. (but a lot of activity tags. maybe you can use already existing activity tags or export the activities to csv, modify that file with an editor (just use "replace" in the editor) and import that file again.)
Thank you, I'll try your suggestion. The problem we're facing essentially just has one type of rooms which we call lecture room. An activity (in this case, lecturing a course) can be held in any lecture room as long as the capacity of that room is no less than the students involved.
Thanks again,
alin
ok. I understand.
I know that entering the data/constraints is a bit more work then you want to have.
But don't forget that you can get a bit order/system/tidiness if you use this a) or b) variant. Generating the timetables won't slow down and the students or teachers will get a more tidy timetable.
So if you have X rooms and T teachers. And you have less rooms then teachers (X<T), then you can still do an easy tidy up for as many teachers as you have rooms.
Just set the first X teachers into one of the X rooms. Only the last (T-X) teachers will get an constraint with all rooms.
By this you tidy up and generating won't be more difficult.
If you want to tidy up more, then of course generating will be more difficult.
Or do it similar to students or subjects or ... . I am sure some guys at your school will like a more tidy timetable.