Can FET make this kind of schedule?

[Scott Severance]

I'm trying to schedule a set of special weekend classes and support activities. The class schedule is fixed, and the scheduling algorithm can ignore the students (because the schedule is already determined).

What I need to do is assign teachers to the classes. In most cases, most teachers should rotate between classes. In other words, suppose that in a given term a particular class has 7 sessions and there are 5 teachers available to be scheduled. Thus, each teacher should be scheduled once, and two of the teachers should have an additional time they're scheduled. Multiply this by 6 events, and add in the requirement of weekends off and the ability to force a particular teacher to be scheduled for a manually-specified time in some cases. That's my situation. You can find a more detailed problem description here.

I can't figure out if this is possible in FET, because the documentation is focused on the more common cases. Can FET help me?

[Liviu Lalescu]

Please investigate if these approaches might work in your case:

1) A real teacher = a FET room. Allocate activities to FET rooms. Consider different constraints, will they help?

2) A real teacher = a FET time slot. Allocate activities to FET time slots. Maybe consider max working hours per day = 2, or something like that.

Please ask me more questions, but also give me more hints about your problem, after thinking about my suggestions.

[Scott Severance]

I'm not sure I've understood you. Whether I allocate things as their real category or as rooms, I can't find how to set constraints. The predefined constraints appear to be inappropriate for my situation, and I can't find where I can specify arbitrary constraints.

Here's an example of the desired schedule:

My basic constraints are listed in the link I posted above. If something is unclear, can you explain? Because I thought I'd spelled out exactly and in detail what I'm looking for.

EDIT: Looks like the image link doesn't work for some reason. Once again, here's the site where I explained in more detail.

[Liviu Lalescu]

Sorry, I did not see the exact constraints when I wrote my first reply.

See my conclusions at the end.

I thought of something: a real teacher = a FET time slot.

Activities are: A1 (Fr. Jr. Story, Mar. 3-5), A2 (Catering, Mar. 3-5), ..., A6 (Sermon, Mar. 3-5), A7 (Fr. Jr. Story, Mar. 7-12), ... A54 (Apr. 25-26, Sermon). (without considering Weekend off).

Each real teacher is a number from 1 to N_Teachers.

Allocate FET activities to FET time slots.

Your constraints: No teacher should have the same duty on consecutive weeks,  The major duties are TGIF and the sermon, No teacher should have another duty on the same day as they are scheduled for a major duty, If possible, no teacher should have a major duty on consecutive weeks. This, however, is not a particularly high-priority constraint. ----> These might be solved with FET constraint a set of activities are not overlapping (for instance, constrain A1 and A7 not on same slot means that a teacher should not have Friday Jr. Story on both Mar. 3-5 and Mar 7-12).

Other constraints are not available in FET, can be implemented, but it is quite a large work.

Questions: No teacher may have simultaneous duties (? what means that, considering your data?)

Conclusions: May be possible as a custom version of FET, it is complicated, I am willing to give advice to help in this direction.