Custom FET for Moroccan schools

[jaafar]

hello! Thank you for your reply. I tried that but had problems concerning minimum daily hours for students. 

[Liviu Lalescu]

hello! Thank you for your reply. I tried that but had problems concerning minimum daily hours for students. 

You need to enable students min hours daily with allow empty days, from Settings->Advanced. Then, in the constraint students min hours daily, check the "Allow empty days" check box.

Please let me know of the result.

[jaafar]

thanks! the problem I have now is with the max hours per day for all students. I want the students to study less than 8 hours: the max hours must be 7 hours.when I put a timetable of 6 days with 8 hours a day it doesn't work cause I want students to come morning and afternoon. if I put a timetable of 12 days with 4 hours a day the max hours is going to be 6 hours a day. only the Moroccan version considers the two days as a real day.

[Liviu Lalescu]

Did you read all the tricks/advice/text files in the examples/Morocco/ directory? alfaromeo describes there the difficulties and solutions.

If I remember correctly, indeed, there was this problem - I am not sure if alfaromeo solved it. I'll send him a personal message to check this thread.

[jaafar]

yes I read it. I think he didn't  consider that point: max daily hours for students. thanks again!

[Liviu Lalescu]

I might consider updating FET for Morocco to 5.14.5. Is anybody willing to help with advice and testing? I would prefer to have alfaromeo included in the testing team, because he reported some important bugs a time ago and is a very careful tester.

[Chafik Graiguer]

Unfortunately, Official FET does not care about maximum hours daily for students (real day)
It is the only drawback
Otherwise, using tricks in /examples/Morocco, official FET fits Moroccan needs perfectly

[Liviu Lalescu]

Yes, but seems to be an important drawback.

I saw that many people use FET 5.10.2-morocco6, instead of official FET 5.14.5.

If it is useful, I am willing to try to update FET Morocco to 5.14.5, but I need help with answers to some questions and a lot of testing. I would prefer to work with alfaromeo included in the team of supervisors.

Edited to add: I encourage any Moroccan user to let us know if updating the special Moroccan version to 5.14.5 would be useful or not. I would prefer to implement the update only if it is useful.

[Chafik Graiguer]

Although I am not using custom version anymore, I am willing to help in testing any possible update.

[Liviu Lalescu]

Although I am not using custom version anymore, I am willing to help in testing any possible update.

Thank you for your help offer!

From your words, I understand that updating is not important for you, as you are using the official FET. So, for the moment there are no users needing the update. If there will be future requests from other users, I'll consider it. I hope they will adopt your methods, though, and no further updates will be necessary, this way.

Could you let me know how do you manage without the constraint students max hours per real day?

[Chafik Graiguer]

Unfortunately, I had no way to control Max hours per real day for students 
Randomly, FET does not allocate 8 hours per real days for ALL student sets, so I deal manually with less fortunate sets after generating timetable

[Chafik Graiguer]

A workaround would be:
- add dummy activities for each student sets
- Number: 6
-length: 1
-Minimum days between activities: 2

BUT we still need two conditions:
1- dummy activities should be first or last, never in middle (would crate a gap)
2-dummy activities should not be counted for minimum hours per day (empty day is ok)

[Liviu Lalescu]

A workaround would be:
- add dummy activities for each student sets
- Number: 6
-length: 1
-Minimum days between activities: 2

BUT we still need two conditions:
1- dummy activities should be first or last, never in middle (would crate a gap)
2-dummy activities should not be counted for minimum hours per day (empty day is ok)

1-    -> A dummy activity can also be in the second hour, if first hour is empty. Same for before the last hour, if last hour is empty. And this is too difficult for me to add into the algorithm as a constraint.

2-    -> This is an unnatural constraint to add to official FET (though it may be easy to implement).

The conclusion is that an update of FET Morocco to 5.14.5 is needed.

Questions:

1) There is directory examples/Morocco/, with some tricks, only applicable for official FET. Should they be removed? And the example file? Maybe add a special FET Moroccan example file?

2) Allow empty days for constraint students min hours daily - should be selected by default and the user cannot change this?

Other questions may follow.

[Chafik Graiguer]

Same for before the last hour, if last hour is empty.

For this case, there is already an contraint: An activity ends students day

Anyway, I am still willing to help
By I do think that official FET is sufficient.
Max hours per real day for students is not really an issue, since few students sets do actually end up with maximum value = 8
And it is always possible to manually move one hour around  after generation

[Liviu Lalescu]

Same for before the last hour, if last hour is empty.

For this case, there is already an contraint: An activity ends students day

Yes, but a constraint "Activity begins OR ends day" is much more complicated (seems too difficult for me, at least).

Anyway, I am still willing to help
By I do think that official FET is sufficient.
Max hours per real day for students is not really an issue, since few students sets do actually end up with maximum value = 8
And it is always possible to manually move one hour around  after generation

So moving the extra hours is easy? Then, I'll postpone an update of FET Morocco, let's wait for others' comments.