Messages

So 1 term is like using the official FET?

Yes. Especially younger students (from 1st to 6th grade) has same timetable whole school year.

Markus

Hi Liviu,

you understood it right!

I guess your suggestion is working! I think that constraint min activities in a set of time slots would be enough.

Thank you again for your help! I'm runnig FET right now. I'll send you files you asked after it has solved the current timetable in case your solution would not work for some reason. But I think it will do the trick.

Markus

Hi Liviu,

I've made few versions of timetables for our school with FET now. They are getting better and better. FET runs extremely nice despite a great number of constraints we have.

There is only one tiny problem that I'm trying to fix. Activities are divided a bit unevenly to the terms for some teachers. There might be a term of 9 hours in a week and another term having 18 hours in a week for couble of teachers.

The solution I'm trying now is to add the min hours daily for some teachers. Is there any other way to divide activities evenly between terms and at the same time respect the term structure we would like to have? Would spreading activities evenly over the week constraint do the job or would it brake term constraints you've made to mathmake custom version?

Markus

Thanks Liviu!

Here you are.

Markus

Hi Liviu,

thank you for a very quick answer! Here is the first version of the file, that the  problem appears.

Markus

Hi Liviu,

I've started to run FET to make timetables. After adding some time constraints I've started to get assortion failed errors (image attached). I can't tell exactly which constraint is causing the problem.

Markus

I've done some more testing. It's amazing what you can do with this software!

Markus

Thank you, Liviu!

It runs smoothly. I'm ready to add activities of students at the 8th grade.

Markus

Hi Liviu,

I've made more activities including all 9th graders to run some tests. FET suddenly shuts down after placing about 100 activities of little bit over 500 activities. A file of my test set is as an attachment. A version with less constraints runs nice. Is it a lack of memory or what do you think?

One more question. What is the best way to force some activity to be placed in certain term?

Markus

Thank you ,Liviu!

I'll make some testing with greater number of student sets. Adding constraints in GUI or manually to XML-file is fine to me.

Markus

Hi,

this two-phase approach was a plan B. I were trying to figure out how to make timetables to all terms with uncustomized FET in case that customization would be too complicated.

Your suggestion sounds great! Feel free to make any modifications to the file I sent you. Speaking of VT, VP and LI do this second part mean a second activity with the same name by practice. I guess two constraints you are considering are fine and they offer flexibility we might need in a future with this second part thing and constraints mentioned. Working with CSVs is fine to me.

Many thanks to you, Liviu!

Hi,

I made a sample of two 8th classes. I wrote comments to the rightmost column how lessons should be divided between terms and few conditions considering two subjects, OP and TE. Will there be too much new constraints so that customation would be too complicated?

I made out that one way to do what I need is to run FET few times. First I could replace weekdays with "Term 1", "Term 2", ..., "Term 5" and periods with "Subject 1", "Subject 2", ... and set Duration of an activity same as number of courses of a subject. Then I could run FET the first time and let it make timetables that has courses of each class and teacher placed evenly between terms. After that terms would not include all subjects, because they are divided to different terms. According to results I could write separate activity sheet for each term and run FET with those to get timetables for each term.

Markus

Hi,

suggestion you made in your edit sounds to be good solution and it is easier to understand to me, too. And I really like your style. Things sill be completed that way.

Markus

Hi,

1) what I ment was that in same term considering one class of students. Another classes can have same subject exactly same time given by different teacher. Courses of same subject of one class can be at the same period, but not in the same term. All the courses of a subject are in different terms. Week 7 is a timetable of 4th term and week 17 is a timetable of 5th term. Week 50 is a timetable of 3th term. They all are followed roughly seven real-life weeks .

2) For example there is 4 courses of Math to a class of 9th graders. This mean that some 9th class might have it in 1st (3 hours in a rel-life week), 2nd (3 h/wk), 3rd((3 h/wk) and 5th (3 h/wk) term. Another class could have it 2nd , 3rd, 4th and 5th term. If those classes have different teachers, lessons can be exactly at the same time.

In a 25 days FET week Math (duration 12) would be splitted for example like in the table below.

t1-Mon	t1-Tue	t1-Wed	t1-Thu	t1-Fri	t2-Mon	t2-Tue	t2-Wed	t2-Thu	t2-Fri	t3-Mon	t3-Tue	t3-Wed	t3-Thu	t3-Fri	t4-Mon	t4-Tue	t4-Wed	t4-Thu	t4-Fri	t5-Mon	t5-Tue	t5-Wed	t5-Thu	t5-Fri
1	0	0	1	1	1	0	1	0	1	0	1	1	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	1	1

3) I really appreciate your help, but I'm sure you have lot to do.

4) There are few courses splitted to different terms nowadays, but it's not desirable. This is a case with RUA. We would like to have schedules that if a course of some subject is in a term then there would be three lessons (periods, 75 minutes in our case) of it in a week in real-life. There are few subjects that are studied few lessons every week, like Athletics (LI), OP (Student Counselling) and TE (Healthy Life). OP and TE are combined , so the will make 2 courses together (TE: 1 + 0.5 and OP 0.5). Subjects starting with UE are different religions. In Finland we study different religions in different groups. Please don't take them into account because they can be added to the timetables later on.

Markus