Hi,
at our school there are a lot of teachers which work only a few hours a week. Of course it is really nasty to drive for one our to the school. So we set the constraint, that every teacher should work at least 2 hours a day. Unfortunately we have this year a teacher which only works 1h a week.
As a result of this FET doesn't start to create a timetable. Any suggestions how to fix the problem without defining a constraint for every singular teacher?
Niels
I have a nice trick for you: add a dummy activity, 1 hour duration, with only this teacher (no students sets, any subject).
This trick just passed through my mind as I was trying to write you that you have to do it the hard way - add constraints for each teacher :-)
I'll add this trick into FET docs.
Great idea. We started to define a dummy year and a dummy subject. But then we run into trouble with constraints for the students :-(
But an activity without students is good.
Of course it would be nice if I could define exemptions for some teachers, but I guess that it is not so easy to program this.
Really great support by the way.
I could program exceptions, of course, but this might confuse users. If you have constraint teachers min 2 hours daily, this should be respected for all teachers.
I just hope other users with same problem as you will be able to solve this problem with this trick (invent it or read it in the FAQ).
I am happy you like the support. If I am not away, I usually answer fast and try to implement new features or suggest tricks.
I can understand Your worries about the exceptions. Perhaps you could change the user interface so that it will be possible to select more than one teacher, group, activity or subject to add a constraint. Of course in this case it was only easy to define a constraint for many teacher. If it will become necessary to change something each single constraint must be changed.
The interface is my weak point. I hope in the future I'll find a team to work on a timetabling program to make it nicer and easier to use.
Well I think the gui isn't bad of course there are always things that can be optimized, but I had seen commercial software with an inferior gui.
I'm personally can only program Java so I had to rewrite it first before I could start help you ;-)