Breaks and double lessons.

[Daniel]

Hey,

After some testing with FET on our time tables, I have found that one of the main issues we have is related to double lessons, breaks and the teacher max hours continuously constraint. Our teacher are allow to work max 3 hours continuously.

To get a workable time table I had to allow double lessons to span across breaks, to do that I just removed the break from FET. this allows double lessons to be placed at any time slot. however this results in the teacher max hours continuously constraint not knowing about the break and not allowing a teacher to have say 3 hours break and 3 hours again, this would seem to FET like 6 hours in a row but is actually perfectly valid.

The only way I found so far to allow this to work this way is use the 2 activities are grouped constraint to group 2 activities, but this results in a lot of manual work.

Is there any other option ?

Thanks
Daniel

[Liviu Lalescu]

Unfortunately, I think there are no other solutions (apart from a customization of FET, maybe).

[Daniel]

I think that would be a useful option to have, but may not be so easy to add with the way the breaks are setup.
I will try to automate it on my export side, giving the option to setup a double as duration 2, or the activities grouped constraint.

Thanks,

Daniel

[Liviu Lalescu]

Maybe (for the solution without breaks) add different tags to the activities of a teacher and use constraint teachers activity tag max hours continuously (but I did not think of this in detail). And remember that you can add more tags for an activity (in your case, you may need 2).

[Daniel]

If you like I could send you a link to our exporter to have a look

[Liviu Lalescu]

Your exporter looks very useful.

Unfortunately, I see no other solution to your problem. The best seems to use two activities grouped 100% and have the break added.

I'll think about it, because it seems to be a more general problem.

[Daniel]

Thanks,

Ye it would be very nice to just have a check box saying allow doubles to span across breaks , maybe you can add this option in a later version.
I m working on making a way to group 2 activities arbitrarily, if you check now you can right click lessons in the academic blocks screen, and set up a link but this is limited to splits of the same lesson, not a very good solution and not very clear to a user.

Once I figure something better, I will let you know.

[Liviu Lalescu]

To allow doubles over breaks would be very difficult, I think.

I think you know exactly which activities to group? You cannot let FET group them, you need to specify exactly.

An easy way, customized, would be to specify for the constraint teachers max hours continuously that between two hours there is a break. I can tell you how to do that, it should be very easy, but I cannot add this in the official FET. Maybe after a bit more thought I'll think of an elegant generic way. Hmm, maybe just like this: ConstraintTeachers(Students)MaxHoursContinuouslyBreak.

[Daniel]

Unfortunately my C skills are a bit rusty , I don't even have a compiler setup.

For now I will explicitly group the activities I need to span across breaks and once I have more time think about a more elegant solution.

[Liviu Lalescu]

This (two activities grouped) should be a perfect solution, by 'perfect' meaning efficient for FET. Please inform me of your results.

Hmm, I am thinking of adding the option of activities to spread over a break, but it may be very difficult. I'll think about it.

[Daniel]

I think it will be a good addition, and ye just from the way the data is structured I think it is a big change to the system.

The activities grouped solution worked perfectly, the timetable took it time(1 hour 12 min) but did fully solved and gave a very good solution. On per and even to my view superior to manually solving it, though some of my collages disagree.

[Liviu Lalescu]

I think it will be a good addition, and ye just from the way the data is structured I think it is a big change to the system.

Unfortunately, I thought of this and I think it would be very complicated to change now; also error prone, which is critical.

The activities grouped solution worked perfectly, the timetable took it time(1 hour 12 min) but did fully solved and gave a very good solution. On per and even to my view superior to manually solving it, though some of my collages disagree.

This is great news, and it means that the option to allow activities to span over breaks is not that critical to add.

Maybe you can contribute your file, please.

[Daniel]

I have the head master and some of the other stuff reviewing the timetable, once they confirm it I will upload the file