Greetings,
we're looking at a fairly simple exercise to begin -
a list of 80 classes offered 1 or 2 times per week,
in 2 or 3-hour blocks
in 7 rooms (holding 2x24, 2x20, or 3x12 students).
Class times (slots) & durations known.
Enrollment per class known.
We need an initial room assignment(s).
Would like to import all/most from spreadsheet/CSV.
(including list of time for activities? e.g. 11:00-13:00, or class time 11:00, duration 2 )
We can make up Teacher names to start (e.g. teacher1-teacher80)
since don't care who teaches at first.
If Java is taught on Monday and Thursday, I can break it into Java_1 Monday, Java_2 Thursday at this point.
Would like to enter # of students for each class (activity) or an anonymous group of say 7 people, rather than specific students in a group,
and have FET assign it to an available room with enough capacity.
Does this seem easy to do with FET, Titito, or one of the modified mapr versions?
are there any XML/csv files that show something similar?
Thanks much,
Bill
hmm...
you can't import the times by csv. So you need to take the xml.
I am also not sure about "We can make up Teacher names to start (e.g. teacher1-teacher80) since don't care who teaches at first.".
I think you can't use offical FET in that case, since in fact you need to add the teacher names to activities. So you need to know them, just adding them anonymous won't help you, since you still need to add them. So I fear you must take the MAPR version. (Except a teacher teachs just a single group. in that case you can add them anonymously)
So you only want to schedule the rooms? Why did you schedule the times, but not the teachers nor the rooms?
I am not sure why this should be a clever way to do it. Did you ever done it that way and what is the advanatge of that variant?
1) the 1st case is for new space planning in a new building based on an old schedule. There will be other approaches & constraints, but would like to handle this first.
2) I've no problem with XML (& can autogenerate with Python if easier in a more complicated case) - so if there's an example of XML to import the times, that would be great.
3) as noted, I assume I can just create a list in Excel or Python of teacher1 to teacher80 to match the 80 classes/groups and import that into FET/mapr. Later on more real-world scenarios, I can give actual names. MAPR is probably fine with me to handle this particular space-planning case.
4) I can imagine that some multi-room conferences could use this time+event(group) mapped to rooms with enough space, and they also might not know exact speakers until later in the process - but in any case, I don't want to justify approach as a general "good thing" - it's something someone needs, and while it was largely done "by hand" this time, I fear it will come back and would like to make it a simpler exercise, even as I try to use FET or MAPR in more usual ways.
(though I suspect there will always be some bias towards "we always taught this class(group) around X time, and we'd like to keep doing it", which may tie into particular teachers' normal schedule/availability or other typical scenarios they're comfortable with)
i guess for 1) and 4) is only required in very few situations and those cases will be to restrictive. I fear the timetable will become impossible very easy; while it will be easy if the times are not fixed. But you can try it of course.
Check the fet file; it is a xml file. There are many examples added. I recommend to check a very easy one by generating it yourself.
Just add a single activity and add time constraint:
fet -> data -> time constraint -> activity -> An activity has got a fixed preferred starting time.