Using staff as rooms

[mlabuschagne]

Hi All!
I am in my second year of using FET and loving it, BUT I am definitely not skilled at IT/programming- what I know I have learnt through many mistakes and experimenting but have now come across a scenario for which I am not sure what to test next!  In my timetable, I have opted using staff as "rooms": the "preferred rooms" constraint allows for staff to be selected from a list of suitable options as it supports the solution of our timetable.  It does create the following challenge: I have 4 science labs but 7 science teachers. Each of these teachers will teach 4-5 courses with 5 lessons to each course, of which 2 lessons will be consecutive (for science practicals).  How can I ensure that each course will have the same teacher selected (I have used "max rooms per activity" constraint set to 1), but also have access to one of the 4 labs? It does not matter which labs are used as long as the consecutive lessons are in the same lab.  I wanted to share my timetable here but my file seems to be too big to be attached.
Regards,
Marko

[Liviu Lalescu]

Hello, Marko,

You can archive your file and post it here.

[mlabuschagne]

Hi Liviu,
I have attached my file now.

Thanks,

[Liviu Lalescu]

Hi, Marko,

I am not sure I will be able to look on your file soon, because I am working on some FET improvements. However, I want to tell you that to allocate teachers to students, maybe a better option is the Block planning mode. Rooms constraints are slow and not converging very well.

I hope you might find help from other users of the forum here.

[mlabuschagne]

Thanks Liviu! No worries - I'll keep trying to test different things!

Just as a side note: I have converted rooms back to teachers once I found a solution and allocated them as per the solution hoping to use rooms for the labs I'm trying to assign...running for 26 hours the program could not find the solution again...

Hopefully there is others that have tried the same with a suggestion!

All the best with your improvements - I am sure they will be great!