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Thank you for your replies Vangelis and Volker

Volker, I'm not trying to solve a substitution problem, I just want an "admin" period for a teacher per day and decided that the best way was to actually create 5 admin periods with minimum 1 day between activities and added no students to the activity. In that way, it ensured each teacher had an admin/free/gap lesson.

After the timetable generated, I just opened the generated FET file, which contains the "Admin" periods and removed them, leaving a gap every day.

Thanks again for your reply.

Well, in fact you are wrong.
If you set max 7 hours per day, then it might happen that a teacher always have got free the last period on Monday to Thursday also. So the only difference between that 4 days and Friday is, that the free period on Friday will be 100% the last one, while on the other days the chance is below 100%. I don't know your dataset, but if the students don't have got Monday to Thursday always 8 hours per day (and I guess that is not the case), then the chance for a teacher to have free the last period on Monday to Thursday is very high! Probably close to 95%!

You can force to have a free period on Friday on several ways. There are a few variants for it. But please rethink about the problem I wrote above first. In my opinion you shouldn't add such a rule, it sounds like you only want to force teachers to stay in school, even most of the time they have nothing to do in their gap time.

In our setting teachers are always at school, irrespective of whether they have class or not. I am trying to be "nice" to ensure they have a "gap" on a Friday somehwere, in other words, not working every lesson there is. And yes, they will have the last lesson "free", but by that time they're home already. I just want them to be able to have one admin period during the day at school.

We are running a timetable of 5 days and I want each teacher to have one period (hour) "free" per day. This is easy to implement, but there is one day (a Friday), where we have one less period.
Monday - Thursday 8 periods
Friday - 7 periods

If I implement max 7 hours per day, then some teachers end up not having a free period on a Friday. Is there a way around it?

Thank you,
Adele

Hi everyone,

I've got a scenario where I've got a timetable that takes quite a while to build, but I've got a new requirement where a group of students can go to any of two teachers, not a specific teacher. So for a practical lesson they can go to either Teacher A or Teacher B. Is there a solution to this in FET Timetabler? If I specify a specific teacher, it doesn't build (I've let it run for over 5 hours multiple times), but without that constraint it does build.

Any help or guidance are appreciated.

Thank you Luviu,

Where do I find the block planning example by Darren McDonald?

Thanks Liviu, I appreciate your feedback. Sorry about the health issues, I hope you're better soon.

Unfortunately, as a small school in Africa I'm going to try some other things before I call in your help. Could you maybe just point me to an example or more details regarding the block planning mode? I don't think I've ever used that.

Good evening everyone,

I have been using FET timetabling for years. I build various timetables for our different schools. One school's timetable is particularly tricky with lots of different combinations. I've always been able to get away with doing things the quick and easy way (or perhaps the only way I know how).

I use StElTo and then manually use that information in FET in a very basic format. I also can't import the exports from StElTo into FET as there are missing files.

Do the developers of FET provide a support/training function to assist me in showing how I can perhaps set the system up in a better way? Our basic rules aren't being met and timetable is not building. I'm not sure if it is because it's really impossible, or because I am setting it up in a limiting way.

Please let me know if such a service is offered and if so, at what cost.

Thank you very much in advance.

Adele

Good day,

Different aged group students have different breaks and teachers can have any of the breaks.

So let's say
Period 1 08:00 - 08:30 everyone has class
Period 2 08:30 - 09:00 everyone has class
Period 3 09:00 - 09:30 grade 1 to 3 have break, but grade 4 - 6 have class
Period 4 09:30 - 10:00 grade 4 to 6 have break, but grade 1 - 3 have class
Period 5 10:00 - 10:30 everyone has class
Period 6 10:30 - 11:00 grade 1 to 3 have break, but grade 4 - 6 have class
Period 7 11:00 - 11:30 grade 4 to 6 have break, but grade 1 - 3 have class
Period 8 11:30 - 12:00 everyone has class

I did not specify any breaks on FET, just managed the "students not available" set.

Now i want teachers to have at least one of those two breaks, but most teach grade 1 to 6.

Is there a rule where I can say I want each teacher to occupy a maximum of one period between period 3 and 4 and also only only period between period 6 and 7. I don't mind which one it is and it doesn't have to be the same on every day.

O hope the question is stated clearly. 

Thanks in advance,
Adele

How about using the "A set of activities has a preferred starting time"? Then you can say the online tagged ones can start at a certain hour and in the onsite ones can start at other times?

I hope this helps,
Adele

Good day,

We have science practicals that happen in a laboratory. There are too many to fit into the lab for the week. Is there a way that I can mark all the practical periods and then say those periods can overlap, but can't overlap more than once in a weekly cycle, i.e. that I can say this week Physics has a prac and next week Bio has a prac.

It can place however way it wants, there are no other timing constraints, as long as there are not more than 1 clash in a weekly cycle between activities with a certain tag.

I hope this makes sense.

Thank you,
Adele

Good day,

Firstly, thank you for a great tool!

I want to use StElTo to schedule my students into classes (I've been using it successfully before). I have one subject that has more hours than the other subjects I want to schedule. E.g. Mathematics has 6 hours, all other subjects have 4, 2 or 1 hours. Is there a way that I can split mathematics and let it run with the courses with 4 hours and the rest with the courses of 2 hours? I know this is possible by splitting mathematics into 2 subjects. The trick is that I want the same students in the maths4 and the maths2 courses.

Is that possible?

Thank you,
Adele

Thank you Liviu, your feedback is greatly appreciated.

I have the following problem with the scenario above. Each class must have a teacher allocated and it doens't do it that way.

From what I can gather now is that Class 1 could have 2 teachers in that period, but class 2 has no teacher in that period. Is there a way to force a class and teacher to go together?

I'm obviously not explaining myself well, so let me try it this way. I have 15 classes, let's call them class 1,2,3,4,5...up to 15. They have a test period sometime during the week, freely scheduled and can be at any time. Class 1,2,3.4 might be one activity with all those 4 classes together, but class 5 might be an activity on its own. So there are (in my scenario) 7 activities with the subject TEST as follows:
Class 1
Class 2
Class 3
Class 4
Class 5,6,7,8
Class 9,10,11
Class 12,13,14,15

Now I have 10 teachers who has to do supervision at those 15 classes, so let's call those teachers TeacherA to TeacherJ. Some of them would need to supervise a test twice, e.g.
TeacherA - 1 test period
TeacherB - 1 test period
TeacherC - 1 test period
TeacherD - 1 test period
TeacherE - 1 test period
TeacherF - 2 test periods
TeacherG - 2 test periods
TeacherH - 2 test periods
TeacherI - 2 test periods
TeacherJ - 2 test periods

How can I set it up so that any of the teachers (A to J) are allocated to the classes activities (1 to 7)? As soon as I go and manually do the following on the activity, my timetable doesn't want to build, so I wanted to know if there's a way that I can say "Take any of these 10 teachers and allocate them to these 7 activities, but some activites has more than one teacher required":
Class1 - TeacherA
Class2 - TeacherB
Class3 - TeacherC
Class4 - TeacherD
Class5,6,7,8 - Teacher E, TeacherF, TeacherG, TeacherH
Class9,10,11 - TeacherI, TeacherJ, TeacherF
Class12,13,14,15 - TeacherG, TeacherH, TeacherI, TeacherJ

Thank you Liviu,

The scenario is like this. I have 15 classes (by classes I mean student groups, i.e. 8 Blue, 8 R, 9 B, 9R, etc). Those classes each has a test period a week. The test periods are not at the same time, some are, like all grade 9s are together, all grade 10 classes together and all grade 11 and 12 classes together. Grade 8 is not at the same time. So it could be 4 grade 8 classes, all grade 9, all grade 10 and then grade 11 and 12 together, meaning it is 7 activities. Those 7 activities will take place in 15 different classrooms and need 15 teachers to supervise (obviously during the 7 different time slots).

I want those 7 activities to choose any one of the 15 teachers available - whatever suits FET best. The problem is that some teachers will need to invigilate 2 test periods and another only 1, so I want to give 10 teacher names and say I don't care who supervises which period, but these 5 should supervise 5 of the classes and these 5 should supervise 10 of the classes (at different times of course).

I hope that makes sense.

The reason I want to do it like that is because when I allocate my own set of teachers to each activity, my timetable does not want to generate.

Hi Liviu,

You've been extremely helpful, thank you. Your program have always worked very well for us. I will have a look at the virtual rooms and try play with the constraints a bit. Will also look at your solution for option 3.

Thank you so much!
Adele