Bi-weekly activities

[math]

Hi!

I'm starting to plan the next semester. Again, we will have to choose e-learing for many lectures and exercises. However, primarily for our freshmen we want to have as many activities on campus side as possible, so that they get to know each other and get into touch with our university. As a matter of fact, many activities will be e-learning activities, but at least the exercises should be on-campus on a bi-weekly basis.

For instance, an exercise is held on-campus in odd weeks, while it is e-learning (e.g. video conference) in even weeks.

Since I do not care if an activity in on-campus in odd or even weeks, I want FET to select it. My idea was to use the virual room feature for that. I thought of defining all exercise rooms twice, e.g. "Exercise Room A (even), Exercise Room A (odd), Exercise Room B (even), Exercise Room B (odd), ...", then defining "Exercise Room A" as virtual room containg both  "Exercise Room A (odd)" and "... (even)". This way FET is able to select the best matching room for each on-campus activity.

However, from the teacher's perspective this has the disadvantage, that on-campus and e-learning activities might get mixed: An exercise from 8-10 might be on-campus, the exercise from 10-12 might be e-learning, and the exerise from 12-14 might be on-campus again.

Is there any way of preventing this mixture? Our teachers would strongly prefer to have their days consisting of EITHER on-campus activities OR e-learning activities.

[Volker Dirr]

i fear it is highly depending on your dataset. So if teachers have many times the same students or not.

hmm... maybe add 10 (or 12 or 14) days into FET and calculate both weeks separated. You might try to separate it by using activity tags and activity tag constraints.

[Liviu Lalescu]

Since I do not care if an activity in on-campus in odd or even weeks, I want FET to select it. My idea was to use the virual room feature for that. I thought of defining all exercise rooms twice, e.g. "Exercise Room A (even), Exercise Room A (odd), Exercise Room B (even), Exercise Room B (odd), ...", then defining "Exercise Room A" as virtual room containg both  "Exercise Room A (odd)" and "... (even)". This way FET is able to select the best matching room for each on-campus activity.

Hi! I do not understand this.

Maybe an idea is to create a timetable for 2*5 days, and add min+max days between activities, activities occupy max 1 different rooms, same starting hour --> for each pair of activities. It is lot of work, but it should work (there is an old post here on the forum asking for the occupy max 1 different rooms for this, the other details worked and were available at that time).

[math]

Hi Liviu! Hi Volker!

Thanks a lot for your replies, but I'm still not sure how to model my schedule.

I try to explain the problem in other words: due to the Corona situation, many activities will be e-learning activities next semester. Planning such activities is easy since they do not need a room but only a free time slot for teacher and students.

More complicated are activities that should take place on university campus, because we cannot use the regular rooms. We have to ensure that students keep a minimum distance of 1,5m inside all rooms, so that rooms need to be much larger than in regular semesters. For instance, exercises with 20 students need to be scheduled to rooms that usually provide place for 50-60 students.

Since we do not have enough large rooms, we cannot have each activity on-campus every week. Our solution is basically to have lectures on a e-learning basis only. Exercises shall rotate between e-learning and on-campus. For instance: in odd weeks the exercise is e-learning, in even weeks the exercise is on-campus.

In principle I have no problem in modeling this in FET. I can either choose to define a week as 10 days as suggested by Volker or I use virtual rooms. Both approaches should work.

But I have one thing that is totally unclear to me, no matter which approach I choose:

To reduce the risk of Corona infections, we are urged by university administration to have our students on campus as short as possible. This means that we shall not have gaps between on-campus activities. Students shall arrive on university campus, have their exercises one after the other, then directly leaving the campus again.

I don't have an idea how model this in FET.

In Time->Students it's possible to specify "Max gaps per day/week", but this applies to ALL activities. Since I do not care for gaps between e-learning activities, I cannot use that constraint.

I'm thinking about something like Time->Tags->"Max gaps per day/week". This way I could tag all on-campus activities and define a maximum of gaps (=0) between them.

Or maybe Time->Activities->"Max gaps per day/week for a set of activities". Here I would define the set of on-campus activities and define a maximum of gaps (=0) between them.

Since both constraints do not (yet ) exist in FET, I do not have an idea how to model it.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Liviu Lalescu]

Interesting suggestions, but unfortunately I think I cannot do them now. I will add them to the TODO for now.

[math]

Hi Liviu!

Thanks for putting it to your TODO list.

I'm thinking about this workaround:

I have numerous groups of students that are assigned to activities. For each student group I'm creating a corresponding dummy teacher.

Now I'm looking at all on-campus activities:

• For each on-campus activity I'm creating a dummy activity.
• Then I'm defining that both activities should have the same starting day and time.
• For each student group that is assigned to the on-campus activity, I'm assigning the corresponding dummy-teacher to the dummy activity.

Finally I'm specifying for all dummy teachers Time->Teachers->Max gaps per day for a teacher=0

Do you think that this might work?

Basically I could also work with dummy students instead of dummy teachers, but the "max gaps per day" constrained is locked there.

Cheers,
Matthias

[Liviu Lalescu]

Hello, Matthias,

It might work. Things are optimized while generating this.

Max gaps per day for students is not "perfectly" optimized, but it is working good, you can activate and use it (maybe you could make a comparison). And anyway max gaps per day = 0 is equivalent with max gaps per week = 0.

[Liviu Lalescu]

Hello, @math , @Volker Dirr , and other users,

I saw this suggestion while browsing the TODO file (item #413). I might add it: teacher(s)/students (set) activity tag max gaps per day/week. It is useful also to make sure fortnightly activities are at the beginning or the end of the day.