Messages

Great to hear about the comparison to commercial tools! Good job.

you assertions are right, there are 200 activities max, but generally, many parents do not apply for their 5 slots. Often they will not come. The cut-off point is generally through fairness, so if a parent has two overbooked teachers, the parent will get at least one of them. It's fairly simple, really.

The amount of gaps is not so important, btw. As long as the day is planned and the parent does not have to come by from 17:00-22:00 for three five minute meetings.

If FET solves my problems, btw, I will definitely get my boss to donate :-).

Slinger

Nope, that was my point. We will cut it off (at 20), before we feed the scheduler an impossible problem.

Oh no, you are reading too much into it. It's a simple problem, and your previous solution sounds just right. Each parent will want a single meeting with a teacher to discuss report grades. Generally, there will be teachers who are overbooked (getting more requests than there are slots in the evening), but we will simply draw a cut-off point for those teachers who are overbooked at the amount of slots on a given evening.

So the idea is that a parent comes in at the planned time, has one to five (consecutive or almost consecutive with some holes in his/her schedule) meetings with separate teachers sitting at separate tables. Then the parent goes home again, hopefully feeling well informed about their children and their performance in school.

5000 events is a limit I am willing to accept, btw. I currently have a max of 150 parents having a max of 5 meetings, which adds up to 750. Should there be more than 5000, I'll drop you an e-mail to ask about where I can change this in the source code or config files :-).

Finally, 1-5 minutes sounds amazing. We used to use Tablix, but that takes anywhere between 30 minutes and 2 days. Sometimes without a solution!

Thanks for your exemplary handling of this! I have been treated well at forums before, but this is amazing.

Slinger

This is looking great: I would get the resulting schedule for 1 evening without problems, right? When I said 3-5 appointments I actually meant 0-5 appointments, so that's great.

How would the algorithm perform, btw, for about 150 parents and 20 teachers? And does FET come with APT-Get for Ubuntu?

Could you please put some of those example scripts up?

Slinger

Hey,

I have 150 parents, 10 teachers, and the parents can pick three to five teachers to speak with. Slots are about 8 minutes and we have about 20 slots per evening. Locations are irrelevant, since we will organize these in our school canteen anyway.

I've been to Craiova to visit Netrom, btw. Great city!

Can these parent-teacher conferences be organized using FET?

Slinger  

You made me go into the source code, but fet --inputfile=myfet.fet appears to do what I want. Thanks, I hope my answer helps others.

Liviu,

I need some instructions on how to use FET command line. I want to automatically generate a schedule in XML based on the .fet files I've created. Can you help me with that? Can I do something along the lines of fet --help to get more info? I am missing this info in the manual.

I'll go look in the old manuals now...

Slinger