How to assign pool of teachers to activities

[mark]

Hi! need help pls...but before i state my dilemma let me just thank everyone for creating and improving this wonderful software  ...ok here's my problem, suppose i have a set of activities (in my case chemistry courses with specific time slots and rooms), then i have a pool of teachers which i should assign to these courses (each teacher has a set of "not available times", because they are also teaching other chemistry courses)...is it possible for FET to assign the teachers to any these activities, making sure that the course is not in conflict with the "not available time"?

Thanks.

[Liviu Lalescu]

I think the answer is 'no', you have to choose personally.

If a teacher is not available and an activity with that teacher has a preferred time with 100% weight, FET will report if these constraints are contradicting each other.

Also, other users tried to make FET choose the teachers for the activities. They considered a real teacher = a FET room or had other similar approaches.

[mark]

ok i think i understand what you meant by "teacher = room"...i'll try this right away  thanks for your prompt reply 

[mark]

ok just tried the approach you suggested above using a small set of data and its a success...FET correctly chose which "teacher = room" is available given a set of constraints...haha my problem now is how to enter my data, changing the teachers into rooms 

[Liviu Lalescu]

ok just tried the approach you suggested above using a small set of data and its a success...FET correctly chose which "teacher = room" is available given a set of constraints...haha my problem now is how to enter my data, changing the teachers into rooms 

I just thought: you may swap teachers with rooms by using import/export to CSV and importing rooms from the teachers file.

Let me know if FET proved useful.

[yush]

But if I assign a group of activities (say 5 periods of the same class) to a pool of preferred rooms, FET will just randomly choose from the pool. Is there anyway to force it to "stick" with the same room, ie. the same teacher?

This problem is actually another big problem that I am facing now. My school has limited number of rooms, so teachers have to share the rooms. How can I maximize the possibility of each group of activities using the same room?

[Liviu Lalescu]

There is no constraint to force a set of activities to be in the same room. This is requested by more users, but it seems too difficult (at least for the moment). I'll try to think about it.

To maximize the probability of a set of activities being in the same room, add one constraint with weight under 100%, to a chosen preferred room, for each activity in the set.

[Liviu Lalescu]

Reviving an old topic: I'll add constraint Activities occupy max rooms (in this case, max 1 room). The new snapshot will follow soon (see the snapshots section), and I hope I'll release soon the future FET-5.18.0 with the new constraint.