Hello everyone,
I am currently evaluating FET and would appreciate some advice from more experienced users.
From what I understand, FET generates weekly timetables, whereas my requirement is to plan an entire academic year with multiple overlapping intakes and short courses.
As an example, one academic module has six subjects running in parallel during the main teaching phase. Teaching is delivered in two daily sessions, AM and PM. Three of the six subjects contain a significant mathematical component, so two maths-heavy subjects should not be scheduled on the same day. Once the required hours for those six subjects have been completed, a seventh subject begins; this seventh subject must not run in parallel with the first six.
This programme runs twice per year. At the same time, there are other courses with durations ranging from one day to approximately three weeks, using some of the same instructors and rooms.
My question is how this type of annual planning is normally approached in FET. Would users typically create separate FET files for each intake or teaching block, or is there a practical way to model the entire year, including rolling intakes, overlapping courses, shared instructors, rooms, and sequencing constraints?
Many thanks.
Hello, JJ, and welcome to the forum!
I think I prefer a single file, because if you split into more files you might not have the same liberty and the timetable might be more difficult to find. The maximum number of days per "week" in FET is 1000. Also, there is a Terms mode (designed for Finland).
If you do the timetable for a single FET week which represents more real weeks, it might be difficult to ensure that real weeks have (nearly) the same timetable.
There is help for the Terms mode and a sample file in the "examples" directory.
Thanks, I will look deeper into the terms mode. In practice, no two weeks will be the same for this training center, so let's see if I can make any sense out of it ::)
In the Terms mode, you have some special constraints for terms, to ensure a good distribution, which can be useful. Also, to ensure that some activities end up in certain terms, use constraints activities preferred times (you might want to add special tags to some activities and use the tag in the constraints activities preferred times).
Ok, I see - thanks. I wonder if the output still will give me annual calendar with specific date on each day. But will try - I cant make it worse than the current excel mess :D
You input each day's name and long name, and the timetables will be very large, with each day displayed. You can make a day's name short, and the long name as the exact date, and can choose to print the long names in the final output.