Hi everyone,
First of all huge thanks to Lalescu, Dirr and all other contributors.
I'm trying to generate a timetable for my college which have thousands of students. There are nearly 500 activities and 10 years (departments). When I ignore the elective courses program runs fine. But when it comes to elective courses I cant move further.
Elective courses will be chosen from elective course pools. Usually students won't choose more than one course from a pool. So it is not important right now. I already tried to fix all elective courses from same pool to same time slot but it did not work.
So I just want to get help about how to add elective courses into my input file. Do you guys have any idea how to add elective courses to my input file? Or any idea about contributing to FET by changing source in order to support elective pools? Please share it. Thanks.
Hello, ismailbsrn,
Thank you for your kind words!
I would need your fet file to have a look and you to explain exactly which are elective courses. Unfortunately, I am not even sure what these elective courses mean, so maybe you can explain. I only know about dividing a students year automatically by categories.
I hope FET can deal with these as it is.
Here is my FET input file. I compressed it because the size was 1mb. Sorry, It's a bit messy.
When I say elective courses I mean that there are some subjects which will be chosen by a part of a student group but not all. The other parts of student groups will choose other subjects from same elective course pool. For example in given FET file there is a student group named E-2BÖTÖ4. There are 17 activities assigned to this student group (year in terms of FET). Some of these activities are elective courses. There are more thane one activities with subject E-BÖU402 but all of them has different teachers. Student group can make a choice among these teachers. Therefore E-BÖU402 is a elective course pool.
I want to create virtual elective course pool. Let there be two pools and 5 elective courses. Pool1Elective101, Pool1Elective102, Pool1Elective103, Pool2Elective111, Pool2Elective112. A student should be able to take one course from each pool. So if I can place these courses from same group into same timeslot every problem will be solved.
In order to implement the elective course system into FET I thought something like that: We cant use the option "A set of activities has same starting time" for activities that assigned same student group. If I mark the elective courses and give them privilege to use this option even if they assigned to same student group.
By the way. It's not necessary to use same subject code. I can give them different subject names if it helps.
Thanks.
I saw your file. I saw that you generate it with an other program than FET?
Each FET subgroup should have maximum 5x8=40 hours per week. I think you either need to divide years automatically by categories, or add in the same activity only once all the students year and all the teachers from the same elective course. Will this work?
Yes I just write a little python script to generate fet files from excel files. I think it wont work because I need to assign elective courses to specific rooms. I'm a computer engineering student by the way. Maybe I can manipulate fet in order to let it place some specific activities with same student groups in to same time slots. Do you think this will work?
No, it won't work, because "no students exhaustion" is a fundamental constraint in FET.
You can assign an activity to more rooms by using the virtual rooms feature (read its help). Or you can add dummy activities (no students and maybe no teachers), preferred room as needed, and same starting time as the main activity.
Dummy activities is really good idea. I will try this. Thank you so much! I appreciate your ambition and hope you will be peaceful and happy all your life 🫡
Great then! I am not sure, but virtual rooms might be a bit more efficient than dummy activities.
Thank you for your kind words! Peace!
Please have a look at StElTo:
https://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/forum/index.php?board=40.0
Hi Dirr,
I saw your project but the time table will create before students select the courses. So it wont work unfortunately but I think I can try your program with pseudo students. Thanks a lot.