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You may divide a year automatically (easier) or add manually groups and subgroups.

If class 9A is split by optional 1 (Math, Phys, Chem) and optional 2 (Eng, French), then divide year 9 by 3 categories: A, B, C, D, then Math, Phys, Chem, then Eng, French. If you have 9A as a year, split by 2 categories.

The manual solution: read FAQ or see how automatically division of years does this (try for 2 or 3 categories). Then, follow this procedure, by manually adding groups and subgroups.

Thanks a lot for the help, I wasn't aware it was possible to divide years with categories, but now I found the option

Hello.
I am trying to make a timetable for a college using FET, and I have the following situation: One of the classes is split up into three sections (study tracks) which are mutually exclusive and contain all of the students.It is also split up into two other sections(a choice between two elective courses), which are also mutually exclusive and encompass all of the students. Therefore there can, for example, not be an activity of any study track or any elective class at the same time because they overlap. I tried to accomplish this by adding a subgroup called elective1 and another one called elective2 for each of the study tracks, but this did not work because students got assigned to courses that they shouldn't visit because they are not of their study track ... any suggestions as to how to do this? Thanks for the help in advance,
Christoph

did you also tried it with 0% instead of 95%?

Do you mean to change all the space constraints that are set to 95 % to 0 %?

you are amazingly fast!!
It was ID 112, but in between I tried to do it again, then the chapel wasn't empty any more and it also distributed more activities.

Sorry I forgot to post my file!
Here it is.
I also forgot to mention that I now locked all activities in time, so that FET doesn't have to figure it out again, but can concentrate on rooms.

Thanks for the answers,
I got the room distribution a bit better but there are still a few problems.
I would like to answer or explain a bit what I did and why:

Also your data constain at least 2 bugs:
activity 133 and 134 have two conflicting constraints.
once you said it should get only lap (100%, because of subject). and at the same time it should get room r4 (98%, because of activity tag SE). so you will always get a conflict!

I did this on purpose because I usually want Senior English in their homeroom, only when they have computer science they need to go to the lab. So I set 100 if the tag is lab and a bit less that in all other cases they will be in their home room.

I tried to get the rooms filled up according to how much I like a room to be used (see question 1 above) by putting the set of homerooms option with 95% for the smaller preferred set of rooms and 100% for all possible rooms
FET doesn't allow me to add two different restraints here.

But I got a quite good result by putting the rooms not available percentage to e.g. 98 % so FET will try to put an activity to this room only if the other rooms are not free (at least sort of).

My problem is: still a few activities are not distributed to rooms at all, although there are activity tags, and these tags have preferred rooms.
In one case it was because both of the preferred rooms were already filled, but in the other case one of the preferred rooms is still empty, and I have no idea why. What could I do?

I would really like that all the activities are distributed to rooms, so that at the end there wouldn't be a class standing outside because all rooms are filled.

Christoph

Hi,
I am still stuck with distributing the rooms to the already made and released timetable.

we have a number of different subgroups because of electives, of majoring tracks, of language tracks, and even smallgroup divisions should be still different (though I didn't manage to put them in yet).

First try I added to each activity 2 restraints, 95% for the rooms I would prefer for this activity, and 100% for all the possible rooms. (We have not enough rooms and want to use the shade place only if other rooms are occupied).

This is not ideal. I started anew and added tags to all the courses, mainly according to the groups and  the subgroups because I want the senior English e.g. not hop around but use a set of homerooms. But I added also some tags either because an activity is better in a certain room, or because one teacher allows for his small courses his office to be used.

Qestion1: Should I use for this rather the set of homerooms option with 95% for the smaller preferred set of rooms and 100% for all possible rooms?
Qestion 2: I don't want all the tags to appear in the timetable. is there an easy way to prevent this?
Question 3: The table gets stuck at a course that has only the restraint to be in the office of the teacher, which is not used else. I cannot find the mistake. (Id. 147)
Question 4: Does FET try so hard because in my case there are all the time constraints that I put so that the table would fit the already released time table? Would it therefore be better to somehow fix the times that the table finds without any constraints (to lock activities) so that it wouldn't work again on that issue but concentrate on the rooms?
Question 5: Is there an easier way to set all the available rooms at 100% so that what is available will be distributed? (Other than doing it for each activity tag, activity or student group) (I am not sure if I am clear with this. My problem was, that if non of the most preferred rooms are free (95% restrain), then no room at all appears on the timetable.

I hope this is not too much at a time and not too confusing...

Christoph

I just installed fet on my Eee PC and tested again. It took only an average of 27,4 s for each timetable. Probably my old Notebook is otherwise a bit slow.

when I followed the installation instruction in the readme file, the suggestion was to remove the -g flag from from QMAKE_CFLAGS_RELEASE section.
However in my g++.conf file the sections read as follows

QMAKE_CFLAGS_RELEASE    += -O2
QMAKE_CFLAGS_DEBUG      += -g

Because I didn't know if I should change it then I just left it but it seems to work fine.

I moved the executable fet to the location where the old fet executable still was lying (/usr/bin) so that I could start it with the old entry under the applications menu of ubuntu.

Now I tried it also this way twice and it took 37 s / 57 s. Yesterday after maybe around 2 minutes I thought it would never end because it had taken just a few seconds before. But probably it would have found the solution just then.

Is there a way to keep certain rooms empty as much as possible, because they should be only used if all the other rooms are occupied (like the meeting place under the tree )?

Sorry for the false alarm. After compiling fet I had only moved the fet file and not the whole directory to another location. After trying it in the proper way it works fine!

I will try to follow your advice and distribute activity tags and the corresponding preferred rooms.

Thanks

I tried to put different restraints with homerooms for groups (like senior students, junior students and so on), or activities (computer lab for computer science)...
and I thought it might be enough, but still the rooms timetable is quite blanc. Do I need to specify for each subgroup space restraints or for each activity? But then I would do what I thought the program would do for me: distributing the activities according to the size of the rooms and the availability.

Another problem that came up: I finally managed to install the new version of FET, but when I entered the .fet file it was not possible to find a solution
with exactly the same file the old version finds a solution in 13 seconds.

Thanks for all your help!
Christoph

Thanks for the help and the detailed answer!
I noticed that I need to upgrade, and that I had - without knowing it - deleted the html files by trying to make a new timetable, which overwrote the old ones.

But it worked to set the teacher's available times to the released timetable info.

Now I added some rooms and thought after I specified how many students are in each subgroup  it would distribute the rooms to the activities.
But it  didn't.
It is a bit difficult to add homeroom restraints, because the groups are changing so much (being split up for certain activities and united with other students from higher levels for others).
What do I have to do that the rooms are distributed.
I appreciate any idea in regard of that.
Christoph

Hi,
I (or better FET) has made an exellent timetable for our college and I released it. But I didn't add rooms at all. Now I see that it would be good to have rooms organized by it.
Is there at all a way to import the old timetable (which I have in html format), and then let FET do the rooms? I don't want to do a new timetable because the semester already started just now. Or do I have to make the teachers only available on the actual times which I take from the already generated timetable?
Thanks for your help!
Christoph

Thanks for the fast reply.
I think I will try to make the activities of those teachers who don't want to come many times with 2 periods, so they don't have to come for one.
Thanks
Christoph