"A teacher begins early/leaves late school (in a week)" constraint

[infoo_]

Hello

I would like to suggest adding a constraint called "A teacher begins early (in a week)" or a similar name, meaning that a teacher can start teaching as soon as possible in the first allowed hour of the teacher's available times.

FET should alert when this constraint is not included in the teacher's available times.

This constraint would prevent a very common situation like this:

In an afternoon school, many teachers came from another school in the morning, and they can teach from 1 to 5 pm, but if FET found that can teach from 3 to 5 pm and teacher available time is 1 to 5 pm, then the time 1 to 3 pm would count as "gap" since the teacher does not prefer to have leisure time (again, it would count as "gap" like "max gaps per day" but in the beggining of the teacher's available times).

Maybe set a number like "A students set begins early (max beginnings at second hour)" constraint do using 0,1,2.. (always prefer 0). And % could be <=100% since it is not mandatory if FET fails to schedule as soon as possible. It depends on how hard can be the programming of the constraint.

This can also happen in the last hours of a morning school, when the teacher prefers to leave late (so reduce gaps between the school in afternoon) instead of start early (the last hours would count as "gaps" by the same reasoning).

What do you think?

[Volker Dirr]

I think alerting about missing constraints will be bad, since there are so many constraints that might be very important and missing. So there might be hundrests of alterts needed.

About your suggestion:
I guess you are talking about the MA mode, not the offical mode, since in the offical mode you only need to add a gaps constraint to avoid/reduce that problem.

But also in the MA mode i guess you want to have "early" in the afternoon only (since you are talking about gaps in your description), so the constraint is only needed for the afternoon.
But in that case you are wrong, since such a constraint will force also teachers to be "early" if they are not teaching in the morning! So FET will try to set them early, even there if there is no gap for those teachers. So in fact the constraints can even force the opposite! So in fact your suggestion is "only" a minimum number of "early" in the afternoon if he is teaching at the same time the last hour in the morning on the same day.

If you want to have less gaps between morning and afternoon in the MA version, then I think the better way is using a constraints that reduce gaps between morgning and afternoon, like you descriped the problem.