Changing the room of an activity in generated schedule

[math]

When preparing a timetable generation I specify a bunch of rooms that are appropriate for a given subject and/or activitiy. Based in this information FET assigns one of the specified rooms at timetable generation time. However, even though I specify the rooms as appropriate, some of the given rooms are more appropriate than others.

For instance lecture halls. Some of them are brand new, some of them not. Since both kinds of lecture halls are ok for a lecture, I specify both of them as space constraint. At generation time FET assigns for room types to the activities since there is no difference from FET's point of view. But when I'm looking to the generated schedule and see that the lecture is assigned to an old lecture hall while a new lecture hall is available at the same time, I would like to be able to manually move the activity from the old lecture hall to the new.

I would highly appreciate if such "manual optimization" of rooms would be possible in FET. In fact, this is something that all commercial tools are able to do and the feature that I miss most in FET.

In my naive way of looking to FET I don't expect this feature to be difficult in implementation. FET knows which rooms are appropriate for an activity and it knows which of these rooms are already allocated (since the timetable has just been generated). So when right-clicking on an activity in the timetable, a menu option "change room to..." could appear with a sub menu holding all the available alternative rooms.

I'd be really happy if you could integrate such functionality and I'm a bit afraid that you say something like "sorry dude, this is out of scope since FET does not focus on post-generation optimization at all".

[Liviu Lalescu]

First of all, in your case you could try to add two space constraints, preferred rooms with 100% for all acceptable rooms and 80% (or similar) for the more acceptable rooms. But still, after the generation, you may end up with a timetable with a more acceptable room unoccupied while the activity is an acceptable room. This is a problem I cannot solve.

You are right that FET is not a program for interactive timetabling. But after you generate a timetable you could go to the space constraints, find the locking space constraints (of type activity preferred room) and move from an acceptable room to a more acceptable room, then regenerate the locked timetable.

I will add your words in the TODO list.