blog/data/2012-07-07-debian-edu-fet.txt

   1 Title: Free Timetabling Software - nice free software
   2 Tags: english, debian edu, nice free software
   3 Date: 2012-07-07 09:50
   4
   5 <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
   6 Skolelinux</a> is a large collection of end user and school specific
   7 software.  It is one of the packages not installed by default but
   8 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
   9 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
  10 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
  11 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
  12 receive.  The software is
  13
  14 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/">named FET</a>, and it provide a
  15 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
  16 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
  17 both teachers and students.  It is available both for
  18 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html">Linux, MacOSX and
  19 Windows</a>.</p>
  20
  21 <p>This is <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html">the
  22 feature list</a>, liftet from the project web site:</p>
  23
  24 <p><ul>
  25
  26   <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
  27     You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
  28
  29   <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
  30     (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
  31     (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
  32     (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
  33     (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
  34     (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
  35     sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
  36     (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
  37     </li>
  38
  39   <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
  40     semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
  41
  42   <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
  43     GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
  44
  45   <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
  46     with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
  47
  48   <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
  49
  50   <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
  51     formats </li>
  52
  53   <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
  54     and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
  55     non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
  56     (as separate sets)</li>
  57
  58   <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
  59     (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
  60     percentage)</li>
  61
  62   <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
  63     demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
  64     memory):
  65     <ul>
  66       <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
  67       <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
  68       <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
  69       <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
  70       <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
  71       <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
  72       <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
  73       <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
  74       <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
  75       <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
  76           students sets for each activity.  (it is possible
  77           also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
  78           activity)</li>
  79       <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
  80       <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
  81     </ul></li>
  82
  83   <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
  84     <ul>
  85       <li>Break periods</li>
  86       <li>For teacher(s):
  87         <ul>
  88           <li>Not available periods</li>
  89           <li>Max/min days per week</li>
  90           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
  91           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
  92           <li>Min hours daily</li>
  93           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
  94
  95           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
  96             days per week</li>
  97         </ul></li>
  98       <li>For students (sets):
  99         <ul>
 100           <li>Not available periods</li>
 101           <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
 102           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
 103           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
 104           <li>Min hours daily</li>
 105           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
 106
 107           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
 108             days per week</li>
 109         </ul></li>
 110       <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
 111         <ul>
 112           <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
 113           <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
 114           <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
 115           <li>Min/max days between them</li>
 116           <li>End(s) students day</li>
 117           <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
 118           <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
 119             flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
 120           <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
 121           <li>Not overlapping</li>
 122           <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
 123           <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
 124         </ul></li>
 125     </ul></li>
 126
 127   <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
 128     <ul>
 129       <li>Room not available periods</li>
 130       <li>For teacher(s):
 131         <ul>
 132           <li>Home room(s)</li>
 133           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
 134           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
 135         </ul>
 136       </li>
 137
 138       <li>For students (sets):
 139         <ul>
 140           <li>Home room(s)</li>
 141           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
 142           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
 143         </ul>
 144       </li>
 145       <li>Preferred room(s):
 146         <ul>
 147           <li>For a subject</li>
 148           <li>For an activity tag</li>
 149           <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
 150           <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
 151         </ul>
 152       </li>
 153
 154       <li>For a set of activities:
 155         <ul>
 156           <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
 157         </ul>
 158       </li>
 159     </ul>
 160   </li>
 161 </ul></p>
 162
 163 <p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
 164 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it.  If you
 165 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
 166 manually, check it out.
 167
 168 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
 169 <a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
 170 blog post from MarvelSoft</a>.  If you find FET useful, please provide
 171 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
 172 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
 173 section</a>.</p>