First I really want to thank you for writing such a useful application. It took me a while to get it, but later I realized what kind of a gem it is.
I have a problem at the moment and I cannot find a solution for it. I hope someone can help if possible. It goes like this:
Let's assume that we have a Reading class that consists of 15 hours a week, three hours a day. It is very easy for FET to allocate these, however, I need FET to allocate EITHER a.m. OR p.m. sessions. That means, we have 6 hours a day. An a.m. session and a p.m. session that consist of 3 hours each. Now, what FET does is, it puts three hours in a.m. on Monday, but the next three hours in p.m. on Tuesday, and 3 hours in a.m. on Wednesday and so on. But I need that teacher to teach only a.m. sessions through the week. A teacher either teaches a.m. or p.m. sessions at our school. I could create a reading a.m and p.m. tag, but then I have to specify that for each teacher, which is not really why I use this program. Is there something that I have been missing? I hope my point went through since I seem to have used to many words for a basic issue.
Thank you in advance
Hakan S.
At first reading, I think you can use constraint activities same starting hour (hour, not time) for all the 5 subactivities.
Pay attention: you have 3 constraints types: same starting time (day+hour), same starting day, same starting hour.
I'll think some more and let you know if more ideas come.
Another idea: use something like the tricks from Morocco schools (maybe you can read the text files in fet-v.v.v/examples/Morocco directory).
Consider each real day = 2 FET days.
Monday morning = FET day 1
Monday afternoon = FET day 2
Tuesday morning = FET day 3
...
Friday afternoon = FET day 10.
So, you have 10 days in FET.
Add constraint min days between activities A1, A2, ..., A5 - min 2 days, 100% weight (Edited to add:) and also max days between activities with the same data (max 2 days, A1...A5, 100%). This way, the distance in FET days between the activities is constrained to be exactly 2, and all activities will be either in the morning or in the afternoon.
Please let me know your opinion.
Thank you very much for your help. I added the "start at the same hour" constraint and it seem to work so far (though there were some situation where FET couldn't finish to generate a timetable and I don't know why) but I kinda figured it out. I didn't try the "FET days" approach because I had to start everything from stretch and that would have been a hassle. My problem is solved for now.
Thank you again for the quick reply.