Timetable for exams for double-major studies

[zelmarus]

First, thank you for this wonderfull piece of software. Timetabling isn't obvious task. Even using such program invloves studious approach. FET has intuitive approach and often it is enough to read existing manual to get started. But without experience it is not always straightforward how to organize data for various non-standard cases.

Our Faculty of Philosophy (Split, Croatia) has 10 study programmes which students attend as special "double-major studies", i.e. they study in parallel two of selected studies, in any desired combination -- for example, they can study Philosophy and History, and other can study Philosophy and Sociology. Students from both groups attends courses and exams on Philosohy TOGETHER, i.e. there is only one study of philosophy, only one study of history, and so on.

For now, we are interested in timetabling exams only. In FET, I decided to create for students 1. year, 2. year and so on. Next, I divided every year on categories PHIL-HIST, PHIL-SOC, SOC-HIST, and so on, to form double-studies groups. I defined teachers, subjects, rooms... Before that I define 'days per week' to be 21 to cover exam term.

Now, it's time to create activities for exams. There I need some advice how to create them to avoid overlapping of exams for double-studies groups. For example: exam on subject "Philosophy of nature" must attend all students from groups PHIL-HIST, PHIL-SOC and all PHIL-* groups, which means that no other exam from secondary study *-HIST, *-SOC (and so on) can't held simultaneously with philosophy. Probably in play comes tags, or something like that.

Thanks in advance for your kindly support.

[Liviu Lalescu]

The exact answer to your question: there are two possibilities:

1) Constraint activities not overlapping;

2) I am not sure it works for you, but the idea is to have a single preferred room for activities which must not overlap (it may not work if you have more categories of non-overlapping activities).

My question/remark: you only need to define activities for P, H, S, ... (each one as a separate subject). No need for students/teachers. Then follow 1) or 2). I might be wrong.