Seminars vs Lectures

[Fina]

Hello,

I am doing the timetabling for a small university. I have managed to get most of the timetable sorted with FET and honestly, it has been a lifesaver. However I have two small problems I cannot fix:

1. I have seminars and lectures for groups, where the lecture is a large group and the seminar small. I need the lecture to come first in the week and then the seminars. I know I can fix them to a preferred time, but I don't need them at a certain time, just before the other sessions.

2. I have set preferred rooms for some of the sessions that need to be in computer rooms etc, however, it is not timetabling other sessions into rooms like I need it to.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I am rather a novice to FET, so my apologies if these are simple solutions!

Thanks!

[Liviu Lalescu]

Hello, @Fina , and welcome to the FET users' club

1. Two activities are ordered, two sets of activities are ordered, or two activities are ordered if they are on the same day. I hope this is what you need.

2. You need to constrain the activities to rooms, otherwise they will have an unspecified room (you have a statistics before generating to check this). You can add a tag to all such activities and add preferred rooms for this tag, selecting all the rooms, or constrain each subject in this way (just add all the rooms, and for each subject in the combo box press Add).

[Vangelis Karafillidis]

1. Two activities are ordered, two sets of activities are ordered, or two activities are ordered if they are on the same day. I hope this is what you need.

If the seminars need to take place let's say on Monday and Tuesday and the lectures on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, you can use the constraint "a set of activities has a set of preferred time slots". Actually you need two constraints of this type. One for the seminars and another one for the lectures.

Vangelis.

[Fina]

Thank you so much for your help, that is great!

I have another question if you don't mind. I got the lectures and seminars to work, I have got the rooms almost working. However, I can't seem to get it to recognise that I only have four rooms to put these classes into, it keeps timetabling five activities at once which is not feasible! I have put the four rooms in as normal but the timetable is still showing five things happening at once.

Thanks!

[Liviu Lalescu]

You are welcome!

I am sorry, but I am not sure I understand. If there are only 4 rooms, FET will not schedule into 5. Maybe a solution would be, if you want maximum 4 activities at a certain time, to use the constraint activities max simultaneous in selected time slots, by selecting all the slots of the week with X (red).