I'm responsible for creating a timetable for our department. Such a timetable consists of numerous lectures, exercise courses, seminars etc. Not only in our department it is quite usual that teachers only perform the lecture but not the exercise courses of this lecture. For this purpose student assistants are hired.
For example: we have a lecture "software engineering" that comes with eight exercise courses each week (so a student may choose which of these courses he prefers to attend). We have four student assistants hired for this lecture, each of these student assistants takes over two of these exercise courses.
In FET I'm creating an activity for the lecture, assigning the teacher and all students of the particular semester to the activity. Then I'm creating eight different activities, each of these activities having the subject "software engineering exercise course". Then I'm assigning the first assistant to the first and second exercise activity, the second assistant to the third and fourth exercise activity, etc. Since I divided the students of that semester into eight groups, each of these exercise activities is assigned to one of these student groups.
This is working quite nicely and FET creates wonderful timetables.
However, there is a fairly big problem in the way I'm doing it: the student assistants as well as the student groups have their own time constraints. And sometimes it happens that a timetable cannot be computed because the time constraints of a student assistant contradicts to the time constraints of the student group. Then I have to start switching exercise courses between the student assistants until a combination is found where assistant constraints match with student group constraints and the timetable can be computed.
Is there a way of doint this differently?
At the bottom line I do not care which student assistant takes over which exercise activity. All I want is that each student assistant takes over his number of exercises.
Is there a way of mapping exercise couses in such a generic way to student assistants in FET?
I think you need something like the "mapr" custom version (for US and Chinese high-schools). Consider a real assistant = a FET room, and allocate activities to FET rooms. There is a special constraint in FET mapr, max occupied slots of a room, and a relaxation: a room can hold more activities at the same time slot (I am not sure you need this last property).
You could emulate the max occupied slots of a room by this: add for that room some dummy activities to occupy the other slots. And it is better to move these dummy activities at the beginning in the initial order of placing the activities. But I am not sure this will work as fast as needed. This is the only trick I can think of so that you can use the official FET version (if you don't need the above relaxation).
Or I could help you to add this special constraint in a custom version for you, but I would not like to add this in the official version.
Hi there!
This software is pretty awesome. I have a similar request with respect to implementing this functionality. I would like to use FET to assign and establish all of the activities etc... and then have it choose teachers for each activity based on the qualified subjects. That way FET can solve the problem of allocating teachers and avoid teacher conflicts. I do have the custom mapr version but haven't quite figured out how to use the room functions as a workaround for this. Any further insight or the potential to create the teacher assignment functionality into another custom version would be awesome.
Thanks so much
So I've managed to become moderately obsessed with the problem and I have figured out the use of rooms as a workaround to assign available teachers. The only thing I am trying to figure out is how to constrain the room = real teacher such that each day it is the same room = real teacher happening for that activity....Or in other words, the same teacher is dedicated to that section of the course all week. Let me know.
Quote from: EdgeTeacher1 on August 03, 2018, 10:03:37 AM
So I've managed to become moderately obsessed with the problem and I have figured out the use of rooms as a workaround to assign available teachers. The only thing I am trying to figure out is how to constrain the room = real teacher such that each day it is the same room = real teacher happening for that activity....Or in other words, the same teacher is dedicated to that section of the course all week. Let me know.
I will read more carefully your posts a bit later and answer again. For now, I think you are searching for the constraint activities occupy max different rooms.
But please note that for the Chinese high-school problem FET-mapr proved unsuccessful (there are two users who wrote me and their input files are indeed too difficult for FET-mapr). I am not sure if FET-mapr will be able to solve your problem (but I will try to make it work if you send me your input file).
FET-mapr worked for one private user (with customizations for him).
Thanks for the reply!
I think I may have found the workaround without the mapr version. I have used the original FET and because our school utilizes almost the same class rotation each day I reduced the number of days in the week to one (as it will be the same order each day anyway). I then am using the room functionality to designate teachers (e.g. room = real teacher). I've tested with two grades (Grade 6 & 7) with success but I will let you know how it goes as I get more complicated when I will eventually have to incorporate options at the senior grades.
Quote from: EdgeTeacher1 on August 03, 2018, 02:38:39 PM
Thanks for the reply!
I think I may have found the workaround without the mapr version. I have used the original FET and because our school utilizes almost the same class rotation each day I reduced the number of days in the week to one (as it will be the same order each day anyway). I then am using the room functionality to designate teachers (e.g. room = real teacher). I've tested with two grades (Grade 6 & 7) with success but I will let you know how it goes as I get more complicated when I will eventually have to incorporate options at the senior grades.
Please keep me informed.
But this way, you cannot have 2 or more activities in the same FET room = real teacher.
It might be much faster if you only have one day per week.
Feel free to ask me about problems, and I'll try to answer.
QuoteBut this way, you cannot have 2 or more activities in the same FET room = real teacher.
I haven't ran into a problem with this as a room that can only host one activity means that for that time period the real teacher/room is only available to teach that activity.
I do have another issue now though....how do I find a way so that the room has at least one free time slot in the day....this will allow for a real teacher/room to have a break.
Quote from: EdgeTeacher1 on August 03, 2018, 06:25:01 PM
I do have another issue now though....how do I find a way so that the room has at least one free time slot in the day....this will allow for a real teacher/room to have a break.
Indeed. So you can't use teachers max hours daily?
The mapr version has a constraint room max occupied slots. But I hope you can use the official FET, since it is newer and better updated. You might be able to use the constraint activities occupy max time slots from selection. Or maybe add a dummy activity (no FET teachers, no FET students), preferred room that room. So, you might have two alternatives for the official FET.
Please let me know. I hope these will work.
QuoteOr maybe add a dummy activity (no FET teachers, no FET students), preferred room that room.
I'm gonna give this a go and see what I can come up with.
Ok so this worked nicely for my junior school which runs the same rotations for an entire year. I managed to have FET select teachers and ensure Spares by using a Dummy year/grade level (called Prep) and splitting it into as many sections/divisions as there were teachers that needed preps. I turned them into activities and then constrained one to each room/real teachers....Not bad so far.
But, I then attempted to pick away at my senior school and I am trying to see if there is a way to use Day 1 and 2 as a semester 1 and 2....That way I can schedule students that are selecting their courses in the senior school while still maintain the junior school teaching assignments between day/semester 1 and 2 (e.g. same time on day/semester 1 and 2). I have this issue because we have teachers who teach in both the senior and junior school so they need to maintain their Jr. school assignment for a full year while switching out their senior assignments half-way through.
Hope that makes sense. Let me know if you have any insights...
Thanks a million
I think you need to add:
- constraints activities same starting hour,
- constraints min 1 days between activities,
- constraints max 1 days between activities,
- constraints activities occupy max 1 different rooms,
for each pair of junior activities. A lot of constraints, unfortunately :-[ (but you might be able to make a program to generate the .fet XML file)
There was a post like this on the forum: https://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/forum/index.php?topic=351.0
Sorry, I took a bit of a break from the problem. So the constraints you listed above allowed me to get the continuity for teachers that are involved in the Junior courses.
Next problem....the dreaded ability of choice....
So I am trying to sort out how to have the senior grades achieve choice while FET optimizes the teachers that are available....I followed the example in the manual and using my Grade 10 for example ....
In Grade 10 the students must take Math, Science, Social, English, PE. They can then choose from either Sports Med, Art or Spanish....So I created 3 groups within the Grade 10 year titled Sports Med, Art, Spanish. I constructed activities for each (e.g. for the students that chose sports Med they got all the mandatory courses plus Sports Med....)
This worked but the issue is that the FET will not overlap...e.g my Sports Med group have their own dedicated teacher, Art has their own dedicated teacher etc...whereas it would be nice to have Sports Med and Art students take their Math at the same time with the same teacher to optimize the teacher's time. Is this possible....??
I am now thinking of trying the mapr (as my rooms = real teachers) but don't understand it's functionality yet. To me it seems like I can have my rooms=real teachers handle more than one group at a time allowing for overlap but the only option is to increase or decrease the number of activities taking place but then I could have every room=real teacher having double ups which I don't want (e.g. A teacher is then assigned Math 6 and Social 10 at the same time, and I don't want that).
Any overviews of mapr's additional functionality beyond just changing the maximum activities would be helpful or a neat solution to my problem using the original FET would be awesome.
Thanks again for all your help...
Sorry to reply so late, I was away this weekend.
Maybe you can just add two teachers to an activity. Is this what you need?
Please also read how to do students' sectioning by automatically dividing a year according to categories. It might be what you need.
FET-mapr is difficult to work with and is not giving always solutions. Only for some kind of input it managed to solve the problem.
I want to assign a particular teacher for the 1st hour daily.How to lock?
The preferred times of the (sub)activities, or activities occupy min time slots from selection.