Rooms for only some teachers needed

[vadimon]

Currently only one thing stops our university from using FET. We have some rooms, than only some teachers have access to (special labs with expensive equipment). Even if i specify, that such rooms are home for some teachers, they can be used by other teachers. New type of constraint "Room is availible ONLY to specified teacher(s)" would be very useful. I hope it's not difficult to make such a constraint

[Liviu Lalescu]

I do not understand. You have preferred rooms and home rooms constraints, and with these constraints you can obtain what you need.

For instance, in room R1 may be put only activities A1 and A2 (of teacher T), from A1, A2, A3, and A4. Then add an activity tag AT1 to A1 and A2 and preferred room R1 to AT1.

[Volker Dirr]

your request is unneeded, because FET don't use a room if you doesn't set a room constraint. So there is no such problem as you described it.

[vadimon]

Volker Dirr, Liviu Lalescu, thank you for quick reply.
I'm trying to use FET for university timetable. It means than we have about more than 300 different subject names, more than 100 teachers and more than 100 rooms. Timetable without rooms is impossible to use in such case. So i create some default activity tag (AT0), and assign all rooms to it.

For instance, in room R1 may be put only activities A1 and A2 (of teacher T), from A1, A2, A3, and A4. Then add an activity tag AT1 to A1 and A2 and preferred room R1 to AT1.

To get rooms for all cells in timetable in your example i add default AT0 activity tag and add all rooms as preffered rooms constraint. In this case teacher T can use only R1 (special room), while other teachers can use R1+R2+R3+....
If i exclude R1 from AT0 constraint. T will have only R1, while others will have R2+R3+...
And i need solution where T can use R1+R2+R3+..., and others can use R2+R3+....

Of course, i can create activity tag and constraint for every teacher (more than 100), or specify 99 availble rooms to every activities (more than 5000). But i think it's much comfortable and efficent to create some (10-15 in my case) constraint of type "R1 is availible only to T1+T2".

[Liviu Lalescu]

Of course, i can create activity tag and constraint for every teacher (more than 100), or specify 99 availble rooms to every activities (more than 5000). But i think it's much comfortable and efficent to create some (10-15 in my case) constraint of type "R1 is availible only to T1+T2".

I think you can create an activity tag for every teacher. Remember that an activity can have more activity tags, and all space constraints will be respected. A new constraint is not needed, I hope. Because a new constraint means much work, and also an additional complication to the user. And also this new constraint would not be useful to many other users.

[Frans]

When I was still setting the timetable for a University I had a similar problem:

We had 10 different departments
220 teachers
144 different groups
10 000 students and
68 rooms
4 different campuses

I defined two activity tags: One with all Venues and one with all venues excluding special venues, for example:

AllRooms:  R1, R2, R3,....., R68
Rooms: R6, R7, R8,...R68 where Rooms 1 to 5 are special rooms.

When defining the activities I added the appropriate activity tag to the appropriate teacher or activity.
I any way had to define all 4000 plus activities and it is only one click extra. I preferred this rather than to use the time constraint -->Activities--> preferred rooms.

Unfortunately one cannot add two room activity tags to the same activity, if I am correct, for example if one defines activity tag SpecialRooms: R1, R2, R3, R4, R5 and AllRooms: R6, .... R68. In such a case AllRooms can be added to all activities and we can only add SpecialRooms when needed, but FET does not allow this and there might be a good reason for that.

[vadimon]

Thank you Frans. I have recentry found the same solution with activity tags. Ability to add multiple activity tags is really powerfull thing!
I've found that we really does not need activity tag for eache teacher, because all teachers in same department usually have same access rights to rooms.
So i create activity tags for each departments (and a couple for some very special teachers) and activity tag for each activity type (lecture, practice, computer practice). By specifying two activity tags for every activity i can specify to use any of computer room which is available to specified department.
For very special cases i still can remove tags and add preffered rooms constraint.
As for activity tags - as i see activity tags constraint are combined used todether, so if you specifiy user room R1-R5 and use rooms R6-R10 together, you will have o rooms. If you specify R1-R AND R6-R10 you will have R6, R7.
In your case you need three Activity tags  - AllRooms (R1-R100), SpecialRooms(R1-R5), NonSpecialRooms(R6-R100).
You can add NonSpecialRooms constraint to every activity by simply replacing "<Activity>" to "<Activity><Activity_Tag>NonSpecialRooms<Activity_Tag>" in .fet file with text editor.
After that you should  delete NonSpecialRooms tag for certain activities and add AllRooms or SpecialRooms instead.