Thank you for your replies!
Maybe I haven't described our "situation" briefly enough. We are a "school complex", which shares the same administration and teacher team. Currently our school complex occupies two buildings: in the first building we have primary and school students / activities and in the second building (the case described in the post before) we are teaching technical and vocational school students. Most teachers are traveling between the buildings, because we are considered as "one" school, just the types are different (like combining Grundschule and Gymnasium from Germany in one building, Realschule and Hauptschule in the second building, but activities are teached by mostly the same teachers).
As you can imagine, doing scheduling for so much types of schools takes a lot of effort. Currently each "building" does its scheduling manually, but I would like to change it and do the task with FET 😁 . This year I would like to start with the technical and vocational school (because it is more complicated) and if the solution works then extend it for scheduling of the whole "school complex".
So the problem which prompted me to write this post is that almost all groups from my school has "normal" schedules (one timetable for all weeks). Just two years (currently 3 groups) of the vocational school is visiting the school in a fortnightly way. All remaining years / groups are using a weekly timetable (to be precise, in the past school year it was 18 weekly groups and 3 fortnightly.
I am not sure if doing the schedule in terms mode or doubling the number of days per week is a good solution for such a low number of groups. Maybe there is an easier solution which I can't currently see?
While doing the teachers schedule manually, we are planning all activities in a weekly form (since most activities are from the technical students) and if there is an activity of a vocational group - we are trying to match the schedule of year 1 and 2 as much as possible, so that teachers won't have gaps every second week.
My latest idea is to create in FET one year "1&2" which would represent the timetable for years 1 and 2 from the vocational school. Since the second year has just 3 subjects less than the first year, I could create constraints that would move these subjects to the beginning / end of the day, so that year 1 would have the "full schedule" and year 2 would simply start later or finish earlier. However, this solution has 2 major disadvantages. If one subject is taught by different teachers in year 1 and 2, then both teachers would have gaps (but I still can add both teachers to one activity and move the activity at the beginning of the day, so the gap wouldn't be as problematic). More complicated is the possible varying number of groups in a year. In the past school year we had two groups in year 1 and one group in year two, so the solution would't fit, as every teacher that teaches the second group would have gaps every two weeks. Luckily in the next school year we will have the same number of groups in years 1 and 2 so it won't be a problem, but I don't know what comes in the next years...
Maybe you have some ideas / hints how to improve it? Thanks for reading and thank you for your time!
Maybe I haven't described our "situation" briefly enough. We are a "school complex", which shares the same administration and teacher team. Currently our school complex occupies two buildings: in the first building we have primary and school students / activities and in the second building (the case described in the post before) we are teaching technical and vocational school students. Most teachers are traveling between the buildings, because we are considered as "one" school, just the types are different (like combining Grundschule and Gymnasium from Germany in one building, Realschule and Hauptschule in the second building, but activities are teached by mostly the same teachers).
As you can imagine, doing scheduling for so much types of schools takes a lot of effort. Currently each "building" does its scheduling manually, but I would like to change it and do the task with FET 😁 . This year I would like to start with the technical and vocational school (because it is more complicated) and if the solution works then extend it for scheduling of the whole "school complex".
So the problem which prompted me to write this post is that almost all groups from my school has "normal" schedules (one timetable for all weeks). Just two years (currently 3 groups) of the vocational school is visiting the school in a fortnightly way. All remaining years / groups are using a weekly timetable (to be precise, in the past school year it was 18 weekly groups and 3 fortnightly.
I am not sure if doing the schedule in terms mode or doubling the number of days per week is a good solution for such a low number of groups. Maybe there is an easier solution which I can't currently see?
While doing the teachers schedule manually, we are planning all activities in a weekly form (since most activities are from the technical students) and if there is an activity of a vocational group - we are trying to match the schedule of year 1 and 2 as much as possible, so that teachers won't have gaps every second week.
My latest idea is to create in FET one year "1&2" which would represent the timetable for years 1 and 2 from the vocational school. Since the second year has just 3 subjects less than the first year, I could create constraints that would move these subjects to the beginning / end of the day, so that year 1 would have the "full schedule" and year 2 would simply start later or finish earlier. However, this solution has 2 major disadvantages. If one subject is taught by different teachers in year 1 and 2, then both teachers would have gaps (but I still can add both teachers to one activity and move the activity at the beginning of the day, so the gap wouldn't be as problematic). More complicated is the possible varying number of groups in a year. In the past school year we had two groups in year 1 and one group in year two, so the solution would't fit, as every teacher that teaches the second group would have gaps every two weeks. Luckily in the next school year we will have the same number of groups in years 1 and 2 so it won't be a problem, but I don't know what comes in the next years...
Maybe you have some ideas / hints how to improve it? Thanks for reading and thank you for your time!