Hi all,
First time posting so thank you in advance for your assistance and awesome software.
I reached out to Darren McDonald for suggestions on a solution to this problem and he said posting here might yield a solve.
Here is the situation: using FET in block mode for A/B day scheduling.
Some classes, lets say math and French for example, meet on both A and B days, while others (lets say science) meet only on A OR B days.
For the classes that meet every day, some like math have pre-determined groups/sections which is easy to put in FET with an A-Day, B-Day activity tag. However, the sections for French are not pre-determined, so FET can place students in any of the sections that meet on an A-day and any of the sections that meet on a B-day. Put differently, I can end up with different groupings on A-days and B-days for French which isn't ideal for teaching.
Is there a way, or can a constraint be created, so that FET still determines the sections (to keep flexibility) on the A-day, but then creates the same sections on the B-day?
Happy to share file or visual representation of this if that would help?
Again, thank you in advance for your thoughts and for the amazing software.
Ed
Thank you for your kind words and appreciation!
Please give us/me your fet file and any other additional documents/graphics.
Hi Liviu,
Thanks for the speedy response. Is there a way to share my .FET file with you directly?
Ed
Hello, Ed,
Sure! fet4 AT lalescu DOT ro, or liv4 AT lalescu DOT ro are two of my aliases, which you can also find on the FET page and on my personal page.
Thanks! I will send the .fet file over today with some more details on which classes/groups/sections I am having issues with. Let me make sure I send one that solves ;)
Appreciate your help.
Ed
You're welcome, Ed! I will wait your email. Please note that it is 22:14 here in Craiova, and I might go to sleep in a couple of hours.
Email sent. Thanks! I am from the UK so I am always thinking in terms of time differences now I live in Dallas haha.
Ed
Do you have many activities that are in A or B only or do you have only a small number of those activities?
If the number of those activities is low, you can use tricks to make it.
see https://www.timetabling.de/manual/FET-manual.en.html#id_36
Using good suggestions from Ed and Rick, we implemented a new constraint for this, "two sets of activities have the same sections" (for the Block planning mode). This future version will be released hopefully soon.