Hello,
I have already set up students to have max hrs daily = 6. But I would like to limit this to only 1 day a week so students are not too overloaded. I can't find how to set this up and would really appreciate any suggestions to work around this. I'm thinking of minimum hrs daily so the lessons spread out but not sure if there is a better way.
Many thanks
It's depending on your data. There are a lot of variants how to do it.
In many cases the easiest variant it just to add a minimum hours daily = 5 (or 4) hours constraint at the same time.
If this is not a good solution for your school, please ask one more time.
Thanks for your reply. The students have 21 hrs of lessons per week. I've been trying to reduce the gaps so I use max gaps per week. What I found is that fet put lots of lessons on the same day and leave an empty day instead to reduce the gap.
I'll try min hrs daily and see. Thanks again.
21 hours per week only? hmm. Pretty low. So min 5 hours per week is impossible.
Maybe try it with min 3 hours per day first. If that is possible, then try min 4 hours per day.
Thanks. I have tried min hrs daily = 3 and some classes still got 2 days of 6 hrs. When I tried min hrs daily = 4, I got lots of soft conflicts.
What would be another (harder) way please? Otherwise, I can look at individual classes and move manually so they only 1 day of 6 hrs maybe. Or leave it as 2 days of 6 hrs, it's undesirable but not a strict rule.
Many thanks
Still many variants.
If you get a lot of soft conflicts, then maybe the best and esiest is increasing the weight of the soft conflicts up too 100%. And (still) set min 4 hours per day.
i need more information about your dataset, since it look like you are using a data set that allows gaps for students.
Do you have a total of 6 hours per day only? In that case you can use the constraint students max work in an hourly interval. So you select the 6th hour of each day and allow it only 1 time.
The student's days are 9:00-17:00 with 1 hr lunch break, so they basically have 7 possible lesson hrs. They have 21 hrs of lessons per week. Their day can start and end any time.
Currently these are their constraints to give them a good day
Max hrs daily =6
Min hrs daily =3 (when using 4 got lots of soft conflicts where min days between activities not met)
Max gap per week =7 so they don't have big gaps during the day
What I found is fet put lots of lessons (up to 6) on 2 or 3 days, and the rest is a half day or short day so gaps are less than 7.
Like I said, if we can, students should only have one day of 6 hrs so they're not too tired.
Any ideas of what else I can try? Many thanks
hmm... good question without knowing your exact data set.
Depening on your dataset (if you already have a lot of activities with "many" subactivities and 100 weight min n day constraint and also a few with only a low number of subactivities) you might add some activities with a low number of subactivities "together" with a min day constraint and 100%.
Or you might try "occupy max slots from a selection" for the last 2 hours of the day.
But in fact this both suggestions might be too strict for your data set.
The other variant is to allow only 5 hours. Then, i guess, your data set is impossible. But now it is importend to understand why it is impossible. There might be an easy fix possible, so you might solve it with max 5 hours always. But i can't answer that without checking your data set carefully.
hmm...
Maybe Liviu could write/add an exception for one day. He already done someting similar with an other constraint. But i am not sure. Might be a difficult task and might be only as a custom version. Maybe ask him if he could code a custom version for you. Sadly i fear it is not very easy. So supporting FET will help him.
Thank you. I think the timetable is still good with not many gaps. I'll move some manually. FET is a great program and thank you so much for all the support.