Create Availability Patterns

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.

Explanation

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.

Prerequisites

System Effects