Help Setting up a Custom FET - UC Santa Cruz - Math and Chemistry Departments

[pmschell]

Dear FET Team,

I recently came across your timetabling software and believe it may be well-suited for my use case.

I work as a staff scheduler for the Departments of Mathematics and Chemistry at a large public university. While our Registrar centrally schedules primary lectures in general assignment classrooms, individual departments are responsible for scheduling secondary discussion sections associated with those lectures.

In Mathematics, discussion sections are scheduled into department-controlled classrooms. In Chemistry, however, sections are placed in shared instructional spaces, and departments must adhere to very specific day-of-week and time-block patterns (e.g., M/W/F vs. T/Th blocks), along with numerous constraints to avoid conflicts with lectures, laboratories, room availability, and instructor assignments.

I am hoping that there may already be an existing FET model or example configuration that I could adapt, rather than building everything from scratch.

Use Case #1 – Mathematics

Five department-controlled classrooms, each with a defined seating capacity

Standard discussion section time blocks (screenshots attached)

Each academic term, I receive a list of courses, each requiring a fixed number of discussion sections and a maximum enrollment per section

Example: Math 3 requires 4 discussion sections with a maximum capacity of 35 students each

Each course has several scheduling constraints, including:

Discussion sections must not conflict with the lecture meeting time

The first discussion section must occur after the first lecture meeting of the week

Discussion sections should not be scheduled immediately before or immediately after the lecture to allow for transition time

Example: Math 3 lecture meets M/W/F from 9:20–10:25 a.m.

Use Case #2 – Chemistry

Discussion sections are scheduled into general assignment space (no department-specific rooms)

Uses the same standard discussion time blocks as Mathematics

Each course requires a defined number of sections and a target capacity

Additional constraints include:

No conflict with lecture meeting times

First discussion section must occur after the first lecture meeting

Avoid scheduling discussion sections immediately before or after the lecture

Avoid conflicts with scheduled graduate-level courses for that quarter.

Avoid conflicts with other large lecture courses that students will take during the same quarter. This will vary by course.

Overall, I am trying to determine whether there is an existing FET configuration, sample file, or documented approach that models this type of hybrid scheduling environment—where lectures are pre-assigned, and departments schedule constrained secondary sections around them.

Any guidance, examples, or recommendations you could share would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your time and for developing such a flexible and powerful scheduling tool.

Best regards,
Patricia



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[Liviu Lalescu]

Dear Patricia,

Thank you for the appreciation!

Do you need to allocate more students to a teacher in a certain slot? This is Block planning mode and it is a bit more complicated in real life. There are some examples in the "examples" directory which you can see, and explanations in the FET Help for this mode.

Or you simply need to allocate students in a certain slot? Then, Official mode. You create students to make a FET set of students (group or subgroup) = a real life student, and add constraints for your timetable to function as needed:

Add say 100 activities for each subject and section, one for each student.

A1 (student 1), A2 (student 2), ..., A100 (student 100).

4 discussion settings: activities A1..A100 occupy min/max 4 time slots from selection of all time slots of the week.

Maximum capacity of 35: activities A1..A100 max 35 simultaneous in selected all time slots of the week.

You can add preferred times of activities, with X where there is a lecture and before and after a lecture or, if the lecture is not fixed, constraints activity/activity tags not overlapping and maybe students min gaps between ordered pair of activity tags.

I have no knowledge of an exact example file for your exact situation.

PS: I see in your post there is an ending "[/table]" - was your post meant to include a table?

Liviu.