Messages

Thanks for the update. We might have a tough time if there can be no partial solution; we may be unable to get every student into every course they want given the other constraints of professor times, other courses, etc. Am I remembering seeing another package somewhere that did give partial solutions - I remember a graph of "fulfilled student requests" as a comparison between algorithms, where fulfilled requests was not 100%.

On the other hand, perhaps we could use constraint weighting to get to a workable solution. For a tough problem, will FET simply break weakly weighted constraints first until a complete solution is reached? I wonder if we could weight student course requests as less than 100% so that they might not get all their courses if it restricted the schedule too much. In other words, using lower weights for things that can be relaxed, and higher weights for the really inviolable stuff. Does that make sense?

Thanks again for the quick response!

Forgive me if this is obvious, but I'm looking at FET as a way to minimize class conflicts in a small college (200 students).

We have terrible class conflict problems, because many of our students come in with transfer credits and need to take our quite structured program (lots of required courses) in perhaps 2 years rather than 4. We also have non-native speakers of English who have to take only part of the required schedule for their year. In sum, everyone has unique needs, and with lots of required courses, it's proven impossible for our human registrar to construct schedules where students can attend all the courses they need. We further have the problem that our campus is remote, and most professors have very long commutes, so we are only on campus 3 or so days a week.

Will it be really cumbersome to enter separate constraints (i.e. courses needed) in FET for each student, as well as unavailable days for faculty, plus blocked out times for everyone? For each student, this is all entered manually at this time, but for enrollment, not scheduling.

I hope my post makes sense - I'm hopeful we can use a good optimization algorithm to find better scheduling solutions than our registrar can create manually.

I like the idea of doing a pre-registration run with FET after a survey to set a schedule for actual registration. That would help me sell the idea to the old traditionalists on the faculty!

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Duncan