This activity is used to define availability patterns. An Availability
constraint can be used to restrict the time at which an object it is
associated which is available. The Availability Patterns allows an
availability such as "every weekday morning between 10:00 and 12:00 to be
defined, where the Start Time would be 10:00, End Time 12:00 and the Day
Pattern be Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. The pattern of
availabilities can be associated with a Location, Location Type, Appointment
Request, Object, Resource Preference, Activity Type and Skill.
The
system will automatically create detailed availabilities for the the
scheduling window when the associated objects are transferred for
scheduling.
The availability pattern has a Start Time, End
Time and a Day Pattern. The Start Based
flag will determine whether the availability should be enforced only against
the proposed start time of a job, or against the entire duration of the job.
As a simple example, suppose a job has availability from 9:00- 17:00, and is
scheduled at 16:30 for one hour. If Start Based is enabled,
this is a valid allocation, whereas if it was not enabled, the allocation
would violate the constraint since the activity will not be completed until
after the availability has ended.
The patterns can be
activated/deactivated at any point. Only Active availability patterns can be
used for planning purposes.
A validity period is defined in each
entity the pattern is associated with and not on the pattern itself.