Adding activities based on the class schedule

[Artur Sokolowski]

First of all, I'd like to thank the program's developers very much for making it available for free. I've been using it for over 10 years now, I think, and it has never let me down. I'm currently working at a much larger school and have been thinking about one issue.
Polish schools employ support teachers who assist students with special needs during activities. Some of them also teach their own classes. Let's say we have Class 4A and a support teacher named WalczG (who teaches 16 hours of chemistry in grades 7–8 and provides 20 hours of support in class 4A). The FET program generates a class schedule for class 4A (fig1) and a separate schedule for WalczG's (16 hours of chemistry) (fig2).

Now I have to export the schedule to Excel and manually add the support teacher's activities there (20 hours for class 4A). And unfortunately, sometimes I can't fit in the full 20 hours because the activities overlap. (fig3).

I'm looking for an automated solution that would meet this condition: when I add 20 hours of support activities for teacher WalczG, the system must schedule those activities so that they overlap with class 4A. I've tried adding teacher WalczG to selected activities in class 4A (as second teacher). However, strictly selecting 20 activities limits the flexibility of the schedule. It would be much better if the FET system automatically selected, for example, from the 29 activities in class 4A. This would be much better for several teachers who already work this way. Is this even feasible?

[Vangelis Karafillidis]

Hello.

If I understand your problem correctly, you need to utilize pseudo-activities (i.e. activities with no students group) for teacher WalczG.
So, in addition to the real activities of this teacher, add a pseudo-activity with:
Teacher = WalczG
Subject = 4A_support
Split = 20
Consecutive -> deactivate (you don't need the elements of the pseudo-activity to be consecutive)
Min days = 0.
Then, you need to use the constraint "a set of activities occupies max time slots from selection".
Add all the activities of class 4A and the above pseudo-activity of teacher WalczG.
Time slots -> select all time slots
Weight = 100%
Max occupied = the total duration of all the activities of class 4A (I think it's 32).
This constraint is going to force all the 20 elements of the pseudo-activity to be placed on the same time slots with any 20 of the 32 activities of class 4A.
Please inform me if this approach solves your problem.

Vangelis.

[Liviu Lalescu]

You are welcome, socky_as!

Exactly, Vangelis! 

[Artur Sokolowski]

What a fantastic solution!!! I didn't know this feature could work like that. I just need to add a pseudo-room to these support activities, and everything will be fine. Thank you so much, Vangelis, for your help!!

[Vangelis Karafillidis]

You are welcome @socky_as!

Vangelis.