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Ok I am trying this .. but not sure about the right place / option .. anyway have mailed you the file too .. Please look at classes IIIA & IIIB and class XI in particular where this is occuring most of the time where a teacher gets consecutive periods ..

I think I don't get it .. sorry to be a pain .. but it works like this .. the teacher can indeed have 2 or say even 3 periods in a day maybe with same or different activities .. but what I want to try and avoid is consecutive periods / activities by the same teacher in the same class .. is there a better constraint for that ??

For eg. we have 8 periods in a day - now the teacher could have say, the 1st, 3rd and any of the periods from 5-8 but not 2nd or 4th as then it would become consecutive periods in the same class for the same teacher - which does not work out too well for either our teachers or the students .. (Even if the subjects to be taught are different .. but sometimes FET puts the same subject consecutively as well ..

I can mail you my data file if that helps !!

Hi .. I have a similar problem I guess. My timetable with FET mostly works out OK except for a few minor inconveniences / problems.

This problem is mainly related to situations where one teacher is taking multiple subjects in a class. In such cases, FET (I am using the latest version 5.27.2) still somehow manages to give me a timetable where the same teacher is in the same class for more than 2 or 3 periods (say activities). This is mostly undesirable and to be avoided. Please advise how to solve this ??

Otherwise there is only the manual option to let FET generate the time table, then keep most of the data intact and make the necessary corrections manually in word or excel after importing the HTML file but this is very tiresome and cumbersome and often there are problems that are not resolved so it would be excellent if FET could help to resolve this issue.

thanks

oh by the way, I noticed - min hours daily does not exist in my menus .. its only max hours daily or max hours with an activity available as an option !!

I am not sure how good it will work as there is a minor issue here. A teacher should not have continuous periods with a class (esp. if they are teaching same or different subjects) but the constraint does not seem to work. :-(

i am stuck .. seems will have to just edit the html file in excel manually and fix the problem !!

Dear Liviu,

Thank you for your blazing fast reply. However, I am a bit stumped at the options and their usages. Could you perhaps give me an example.

thanks

Dear Liviu,

Once again I bother you for your valuable input and advise for a similar matter. Ok I understood your logic behind the changing timetable every time even old data file is loaded so FET will generate new time-table.

However, as I mentioned in my mail earlier, there is one small (or rather big for the teachers) a problem that I am still facing. See for eg. in attached FET file, what we are having is some teachers who are having continuously all periods full on some days while on others they have many free periods. How does one distribute these free periods a bit more evenly.

Another issue often occurs is of same teacher having continuous periods in a class (okay for this I presume that the option about keep contiguous when adding activity is not ticked, then hopefully such problem will not arise - but then again we have some situation, where we are adding some extra periods - eg. say - a teacher has already 6 periods in a 6 day week. Now we decide he needs 1 or 2 more periods in that class, so we add it as another activity, but the problem is that it FET will now sometimes schedule activities for the teacher sometimes together - thus if a maths teacher has 7 periods, then sometimes the teacher will have both periods clubbed together (probably FET considers them as 2 different activities).

So basically, we want to avoid 2 situations -
1) Same teacher should not have continuous periods for either same subject or different subjects in the same class (maybe teacher teaches Maths and Physics in the same class, but we want to avoid having 1 period of maths immediately followed by Physics or vice-versa). Also we don't want a teacher to have 2 Maths periods continously.
2) We also want to have rest or free periods for teachers distributed more evenly through the week. at present in most of the generated timetables that I get, there is always a problem for some teachers who have some days with continous all periods while on some days they have too many rest periods.

I am attaching FET file. Please look into this and help with your suggestion to avoid similar situation as otherwise lots of rework is required for modifying it manually ..  :-(

i have tried that option but it does not seem to work. further I mailed you the file by email as private attachment. please check and let me know. thanks !!

when i click on the mail link to you (below your picture), it brings up a window to write the mail, but there is no option to upload or send an attachment (i prefer to keep it private if possible please).

the Teacher should 5 of his activities early as the first period at the start of the day. The subject is not so important as long as they are the ones taking the first period of the day. After that, any other teacher can take the period. This is also to avoid having to allocate subjects like library, computer, games (PT), copy writing or drawing being assigned as the first period. I hope you understand the issue - If you look at the file I think you will probably get a better idea as I have tried to put these constraints for 2 of the class teachers but it is not working out. Std. V-A and Std. X should have their first class taken by respective class teacher as per the constraint but it is giving me some conflict error which I am not understanding nor able to resolve. Please help.

Please advise how to mail it to you ? (the attachment timetable)

Dear Sir,

I am having a minor issue using FET which is an otherwise excellent piece of software.

We are trying to put the Class Teacher as the one who should have the first period every day as they need to interact with the students and guide them on certain issues as per standard practice in most schools here in India. However, the only place to do this kind of constraint / settings looks to me like its under the menu.  (If there is any other place where this could be inputted please advise me)

Time constraints (activities)
-     An activity has a preferred starting time

I tried setting this for the days - however it does not work mostly and is giving conflict / errors despite generating an otherwise excellent timetable, this is an issue that breaks the program for us as we must follow the standard practices of keeping the class teacher (who also takes / teaches a particular subject) to have the first period of every day. I tried it even with a blank file and it is still showing same kind of conflict. Note that under Time constraint - I set weight at max 99.99 at most as the timetable will not generate if we keep it at 100%.

As a side note, I should say that it does manage to achieve this requirement for 1 or 2 of the days but we need it to schedule it for all the required days during the week. We have 6 days working week with 8 periods per day, a 20 min snack break (preceded by 4 periods before and 4 after the break) and 5 periods on saturdays.

Please advise and if you need any details, I can forward you the same.

Any Help and Guidance you can provide in this matter is very much highly appreciated and we will be highly indebted and thankful to you for the same.

thanks