Divide student groups

[glados]

Hi all,

I'm currently trying FET because I need to make a timetable for an information evening with about 70 subjects. People have provided their choices (first, second and third) and I have three rounds; I preferably want everybody to get all their 2 (mandatory) or maybe 3 choices, if they provided a third one.
Some subjects have about 50 people that want to attend, others have just a few; but my question is, how can I tell FET to split the big groups in smaller chunks? I can't do it myself because who is in which group depends on what other subjects they want to attend.

Anybody know something? So basically I want to tell them which groups have which choices and then mix up the groups. Should I use subgroups for this or something?

Regards,

GLaDOS.

[Liviu Lalescu]

Maybe a way would be to have each individual student (groups in a year or subgroups in a group) and for each activity add only the interested students.

Or divide years according to categories, but you have maximum 3 categories and maximum 12,6,6 divisions per category.

Please let me know.

[glados]

I tried to do that but then the groups with say 40 people don't get divided, correct? At least when I tried it that way it was stuck after the 6 biggest groups...

[Liviu Lalescu]

I think automatic division of year does not work for you.

I would advise you to make a year, "Y", and add as groups each student (person). Then, for each activity, add a students group (which is in fact a student = a person) if that students group attends that activity.

[glados]

I had to work with other data so I exported it in a way I thought was best; first, I ordered by subject and checked which student attended that subject, and then made one line for that subject with as student set all the students attending. That ended up in large groups, so that didn't work.
Now I tried to make 3 activities per user, one for every subject he was attending, but that didn't work either because one teacher now has, for instance, 27 hours where there are only 3 available.

BTW I already added a year 'A' and for every person attending a student group with the number that student has.

Something else: with the first option I had it split into parts (so Split duration 1 and Total duration 3, when I thought 3 groups were necessary, for instance).

[Liviu Lalescu]

Split an activity: this is used usually for related activities which should be done in different days.

I meant to have an activity, into which to insert all students wanting to take that course. You can have more students sets per activity.

[glados]

I'm not sure I understand you correctly. For instance, I now have activity 1 with 27 students, split in 2. When I try to generate a timetable I get this warning:
Cannot optimize for subgroup 1 Automatic Subgroup, because the number of hours for subgroup is 5 and you have only 1 days x 3 hours in a week.

For the small groups the number of hours is almost always 4.

The line I import as activity:
"Students Sets","Subject","Teachers","Activity Tags","Total Duration","Split Duration","Min Days","Weight","Consecutive"
1+2+3+4+5+8+16+22+37+72+96+108+110+113+123+131+145+165+168+173+206+245+248+254+259+264+267,1,1,,2,1+1,1,95,0
where 1 is both the lesson and the teacher

[Liviu Lalescu]

If a subgroup must work (has activities) of 5 hours, and the week has 3 hours, it is clear that the timetable is impossible. Each student can have a single activity at a single time slot.

[glados]

The problem is the way I did it it every student should only have 3 hours tops, some 2, so I don't understand how FET get's the 5 to 7 hours...
if necessary I could provide my .FET file?

[Liviu Lalescu]

Yes, you can send your file, here (if public) or by email to me (if private).

I think you added some activities for the whole year. Please also check statistics for students.

[glados]

It's just numbers so not really a need to keep it private. the act.txt file is the one I used to import the activities.

[Liviu Lalescu]

I saw your files.

For instance, student 267. He has 5 hours. 5 (sub)activities with duration 1. Why is that? You only have one day per week, with 3 hours in this day.

[glados]

Good question - in the input file I only put 267 for 3 activities... so is my input file incorrect?

[Liviu Lalescu]

Good question - in the input file I only put 267 for 3 activities... so is my input file incorrect?

You put student 267 in 3 larger split activities, for instance:

1+2+3+4+5+8+16+22+37+72+96+108+110+113+123+131+145+165+168+173+206+245+248+254+259+264+267,1,1,,2,1+1,1,95,0

means that it is split into 1+1, and total duration is 2.

[glados]

Hmm ok. But then, how should I input it in order for FET to split the groups automatically?