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Excellent, thanks!

Hi,

I hope no one minds that I am posting several questions.

I have two activities that are constrained to start at the same time+day.
I also want them to be in rooms that are next to each other, and there are two possibilities for this:
Room1+Room2 OR Room3+Room4. Is there a nice way to do this?

What I have done so far is created two space constraints "activities with set of preferred rooms"
constraint1: room1+room2 (95%)
constraint2: room3+room4(95%)

I assigned BOTH constraints to BOTH activities. A small test produced what I wanted, but I have a feeling this is not the right way to do it.

Hi,

When adding a constraint, a useful feature would be to check if an identical constraint exists already, and thus not adding the constraint. I just tried to add the same constraint repeatedly (just kept pressing 'Add'), and it kept adding. When there are many constraints it can be difficult to keep track of them all.

Removing identical constraints reduces the clutter, and perhaps also speeds up the timetable generation?

Thanks again for all your hard work!

Hi,

My time constraints are often identical across all days. Perhaps other users have the same or similar situation?

A suggestion is to be able to mark the allowed/not allowed times in the first day-column, and then have a copy button that copies it across all days. Even for those that have similar (but not identical) time constraints across the week, this feature would speed up their work.

Thanks for all your great work!

Hi,

Is there a neat trick for saying that I do not want a set of rooms used at the same time. For example, if room 1 is in use, I do not want room 2 and room 3 to be used, but if room 1 is NOT in use, then it is OK to use room 2 and/or room 3?

Set 1: (room1)
Set 2: (room2, room3)

Can use rooms from either set at the same time+day, but not both.

Thanks for your help.

Thanks.

1. I'll do the activity planning (student->activity mapping) manually. Could you put this on your TODO list for the future? The advantage is that the software may find a mapping that permits a schedule, whereas my manual mapping may not. Also, the system could alter the mappings to try and improve satisfaction of other criteria (e.g. distribution of class hours over a week for individual students), which may not be satisfied well with a given manual mapping.

2. Liviu, I am already using rooms for constraints (for example, only some students+teachers have access to certain rooms), so I don't think I can use rooms as students (unless I use students as rooms???). Nevertheless, I didn't understand how I could use individual students as rooms? I see how this would ensure activities to do not overlap for a given student/room, but how could I assign multiple students/rooms to an activity? Or are you saying that pseudo activities be created for each student/room, and then constrained to be scheduled at the same time? If that is a possible way to get a solution I'll try it, but is there a way to easily hide all the pseudo activities when viewing the generated timetable?

Hi,

I've been interested in using FET for a while, and now I've finally found the time to do it. I'm trying to schedule for a university department with approximately 900 students and 40 instructors.

This is where I am:
1. I've entered all teachers and subjects
2. I have setup various activity tags and put constraints on them to represent our situation (rooms, time slots, preferred starting times, instructors)
2. I'm ready to create activities (note that many subjects are popular, and have to be allocated multiple activities to accommodate the number of students)

Now, I cannot really see how to setup Students.
1. I have data about the subjects each student wants to take. How do I setup Students so that I give it each individual student? If you can show me one example, I can write code to output the relevant XML or CSV. We don't have the concept of years, groups, subgroups, and I'm unsure how to map to them.
2. For popular courses that have multiple sections/activities, I want to tell FET that if a student has selected a popular course, then the student must be assigned to at least one of the activities, but that FET is free to choose from any of the activities. How do I do that? I do not want to assign a student to an activity, because he/she would be fine to go in any of set of activities. Most of the time that set of activities cannot be scheduled at the same time, as it is taught by the same instructor.

Sorry if this type of question has already been answered, but I tried searching the forums with no luck.

Thanks for your help.

Regards
mma