Prison-school planning

[Joost]

Okay, first of: great scheduling application! I've tried many free and commercial apps and FET is one of the few that allows me to tweek our needs and give a workable roster. Actually, it's one of the few that allows me to tweek and the only one that gives something to work with.

A little background to my problem: I need a roster for a prison-school. We have only 75 students, 15 teachers, 9 subjects, 5 days, 27 hours a week. (No problem there, FET does it in a breeze.)

The first problems arise with our simple restrictions. About half the teachers only teach 4 days. Max 6 students per lesson. Most subjects only got one or two teachers. Most students got explicit courses (personally program with set amount of hours of specific subjects). All students need to have a 100% filled roster (max hours for each).

Above that we've got our restrictions based on the type of setting, mostly security-based. Some students can't have classes with another specific student. Minimum of two students per class. We have two buildings (secured and semi-secured) and students can't cross. Limited amount of rooms, esp. now half the secured building is undergoing refurbishing.

Most of the problems can be resolved with the setting of some constrains, but other ones need some more creativity or some manual labour after the generation of the schedule. (Our 'simple' schedule has 400 activity's and takes around 30mins to compile.)

At the moment I devised some simple workarounds for common problems: all students are a single subgroup, most teachers are divided by six (one teacher got six teachers in FET, one for each possible seat). eg I'm JON1, JON2, JON3 etc. Students that can't overlap have the same teacher (eg JON1), students that are in the same group have consecutive teachers (JON1, JON2, etc.). Some teachers with real group-subjects (eg sports) have one teacher so I can schedule the whole group in one lesson.

I've seen the source, and think my request is very difficult with the current algorithm. But anyway, the thing that would help me the most:
'auto-fill' rooms: a room can contain one teacher, one subject but multiple students with the same subject/teacher-activity.
That'll sort out all my scheduling problems. But as it is in strong contrast to the scheduling-rules used in FET maybe some other things can help:
- drop duplicate room-check and check for max students (even with multiple teachers).
- 'teachers teach at the same time'; constraint to let me group the JON1, JON2, etc. stuff to minimize spreading.

And, maybe my biggest wish, some interface to replace a single student/activity-thing in the schedule with something different. (We have a lot of 'oh, tomorrow solicitor x comes around for student y at hh:mm; please make sure she doesn't have school...).

At the moment we use FET to make a schedule, copy-and-paste it into Excel and work the data till it suits our needs. We love to get our hands on some more automation because our scheduling is getting harder every day.

Any suggestions (workarounds etc.) or solutions are welcome!

[Liviu Lalescu]

I have read your post, but for the moment I cannot see the solution. Maybe others have better ideas. I'll try to revisit your post in the future.

Question: why can't you just add one teacher and choose the 6 students for each activity, like: activity A (teacher JON, students S11, S9, S14, S6, S5, S3)?

[Joost]

Question: why can't you just add one teacher and choose the 6 students for each activity, like: activity A (teacher JON, students S11, S9, S14, S6, S5, S3)?

With "multiple teachers per teacher" I can use FET to work out a lot of the puzzling. The grouping of students for the individual courses within a class-group is the hardest part. Using different teachers-slots I can simulate cover-planning.

I'll upload an example file, but I'll have to anonymize it first before I can take it home...

[Liviu Lalescu]

Question: why can't you just add one teacher and choose the 6 students for each activity, like: activity A (teacher JON, students S11, S9, S14, S6, S5, S3)?

With "multiple teachers per teacher" I can use FET to work out a lot of the puzzling. The grouping of students for the individual courses within a class-group is the hardest part. Using different teachers-slots I can simulate cover-planning.

I'll upload an example file, but I'll have to anonymize it first before I can take it home...

Now I understood. You need cover planning and do some tricks to simulate that.

Cover planning is not available in FET, unfortunately.

I am sorry, but I do not see solutions to your problem (maybe I am a bit tired now).

[Joost]

Yeah, I know that cover-planning doesn't work. As far as I can see in the code it needs a complete rewrite to implement it, so I really don't expect it. But maybe someone has some tricks that'll help me build my workaround. I must say, with the 'multiple teachers per teacher' FET does a great job scheduling. It's very usable with our low students-per-class, it's probably useless when you have 30 students per room (unless you've got ages of free time to set up all the activities.)