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Had to pause this project but opening it back up. You were right I was using the wrong constraint, I need activities occupy max time slots from selection, that bug was a false alarm. I'll keep you posted if we run into any other issues, thanks again for your help!

Ok I have gone back and forth with our leadership here on the design, they have switched to providing the teacher/group assignments and I can make it work with the max simultaneous activities restrictions. One issue I am noticing, if an activity has a duration more than 1 it seems like it ignores the restriction for the second block. Is this a bug, or the intended design?

I ended up with the situation where a teacher has a class, duration 2, and it scheduled her for Period 7 and Period 8 HS, and then scheduled another class for her Period 8 MS (despite the max simultaneous restriction being active).

Thoughts? I can always make a second activity for this and enable consecutive, with both on duration 1 and this should make it work, but this might be a bug for you to document. In any case thank you again for all of your help!

Ok I was able to get this working and it can spit out a functional schedule for those two teachers, but I think we are approaching this backwards. Ideally we will be able to create student groups first, add them to classes, and then assign teachers to those classes based on availability with the Blue/White conflicts in mind. Does this make sense? Is this something I can do with FET?

I filled out a sample schedule for the student group 9 which shows a possible schedule for those students, but those classes could be in any order that suits the schedule.

Thank you for this! One thing I am trying to adjust in your file, but struggling to figure out, is that Middle School ends early (no period 9 classes) and HS starts late (no period 1 class).

Also, period 5 is always lunch so no classes (maybe easier to omit this period and just use 8 hours).

I tried using time restriction for student sets but I think the activities need to be changed, I am not sure how to do this with your setup

Yes it is vertical mirroring, so the students will have the same classes and schedule, but in reverse (their first period last, etc.)

Thank you for this reply! We really only need to schedule one day, as the classes are the same every day (they just switch to reverse every other day). The problem appears when a teacher is scheduled incorrectly on the Blue day and then it reverses for White, because the staggered starting times create overlaps. You can see on the spreadsheet that Jane Doe's schedule works perfectly on the Blue day, but she has conflicts on the 7th and 8th period for the White day (reversed schedule).

I don't have an FET file yet because I was not sure how to structure the data / constraints.

Happy to give you editing permissions on the file if you provide your google email, that way you can move data around on the Blue day and see how it affects the White day (the white day sheet automatically updates).

Also I added some context on the 'conflicts' tab that hopefully makes it more clear.

As for your personal plea, I hear you! I will request this support from our leadership here.

Hello,

I am trying to figure out how to use FET to sort out our master schedule for the school, but we have an unusual schedule. Basically, the Middle Schoolers and High Schoolers start at different times, and our schedule reverses every other day (we call it Blue Day / White Day). This creates a scheduling issue when the days reverse, as a teacher which has a schedule with no conflicts on the Blue Day will have conflicts on a White Day. It is easier to visualize in spreadsheet form:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fuCN_ySvhYcV9PijVye92fTuVeF-kvUwvYiCA_45g0g/edit?usp=sharing

You can see here that John Doe has a working schedule on both days, whereas Jane Doe has a schedule which works on the Blue Day but not on the White Day.

Any thoughts on how to input the data / constraints into FET so that we can schedule everyone?

The conflicting Middle School / High School periods are listed in a table on the 3rd tab.

Thank you!

Ok great, thanks! The tags are just to keep it organized and add in constraints easily in the UI

A thought, what if I used Max Hourly Span of a set of Activities and just set the number to the number of activities in each activity tag. Would that have the same effect?

Hello is it possible to do more than three activities grouped? Preferably using activity tags like, "A set of activities is grouped"

Thanks!

Ok here is the timetable csv output. We are using this to schedule parent teacher conferences, where multiple teachers meet with the parents. In this case, the "Subject" is the student name.

We do not yet have the math teachers in there, as they have more students than the rest of the of the teachers, so we want to allow the program to double book them and jump between conferences, but I haven't figured out how yet.

Thanks for this reply! I thought of trying to use two teachers, but the issue is that I want it to figure out the schedule dynamically so I don't know which classes will happen at the same time.

Is it possible to create a class that will pick from a 'pool' of teachers? That way I could assign both 'copies' of the teacher to a class and it will grab one of the two copies if it is available.

Also, I'll work on anonymizing the schedule so that I can post it here.

Hello! We are using FET to schedule classes, but we want to allow certain teachers to be double booked, as they have special roles where this is OK. How can I set this up in FET?