Scheduling Enhancements¶

Travel Penalties¶

An additional feature has been added to the travel cost model to apply penalties to a resource based on the distance they have travelled. A travel cost model can be configured to stop a resource from completing activities where the individual journey distance or the total travel distance in the shift exceeds a threshold value. If more control is required a penalty can be applied to the travel cost model to increase the cost of a resource's travel based on distance. This was previously only possible based on the duration of the travels, not the distance.

An additional journey time can now also be applied to a travel when a distance or time threshold has been exceeded. This will increase the travel time but not incur any other further penalties. For example, the travel cost model could be configured to extend the length of any travels that are more than two hours by a further fifteen minutes. This could be used to factor in time for the resource taking a break, or for needing to stop to recharge an electric vehicle.

See Scheduling Concepts - Costs and Values for more details.

Skill Costs and Preferences¶

Resources can be given a preference or a cost for each skill, which can give an incentive (or a disincentive) to scheduling activities that require the skill to the resource. This is useful for being able to prefer certain types of work for a resource without altering its duration (as would be the case with a skill proficiency).

The preference/cost can also be configured to apply when the resource is carrying out an activity that does not require the skill. This could be useful in scenarios where high priority work is likely to arise throughout the day, so there may be a benefit to keeping higher skilled workers free, if possible.

See Scheduling Concepts - Constraints and Preferences for more details.

Activity Duration Override¶

Activities can now be given a duration override (via the Activity_Status table) which will define the duration that the DSE will use for this activity, regardless of the base duration, resource proficiencies, or auto durations.

The duration override can be set manually on the Scheduling Workbench.

Activity Group Proportions¶

Activity groups have been extended to allow the minimum delay and maximum delays to apply only once an activity is a specified proportion of the way through its duration. As some examples, a pre-requisite activity and its dependent activity could be: configured so that the dependent can only start once the pre-req is 50% complete; or configured so that the dependent activity must start at least an hour after the pre-req has finished (100% complete). Previously, these delays applied from the start of the pre-requisite activity. See Scheduling Concepts - Linking Activities for more details.

Duration Overheads from Separation Model¶

An overhead to the duration of an activity can be defined based on the type of activity preceding it (even if that activity exists in an earlier shift). This is defined via the separation model. For example, an overhead of 1 hour could be defined from separation group SG1 to separation group SG2. This way, an activity in group SG2 will be extended by an hour if it follows an activity in group SG1.

This is useful to define set up time that may need to occur when changing from one type of job to another. Jobs of the same type will not receive the extra set up time, but when the type of job changes, the set up time will be dynamically included at the start of the first activity of the new type.

See Scheduling Concepts - Linking Activities for more details.

Do In Locality Incentives¶

A do in locality incentive can be defined for activities. Similar to a do on location incentive, this will provide incentive for any activities that are at the same locality as each other to be scheduled together. Do on location incentives and do in locality incentives can both be defined at once to provide different incentives based on location or locality.

This is useful in scenarios where multiple activities are scheduled to different locations at the same locality. For example, if there are multiple activities at apartments within the same apartment building, the incentives can be used to ensure that there is one visit to the building, with extra incentive to keeping the activities at the same apartment together. This was not possible with the previous handling of do on location incentives.

Shared Part Stock¶

Parts can be defined as belonging to a shared part stock. Shared part stocks act in a similar way to the global part stock, but where access to the part stock is limited to a specific set of resources. The resources that can access the part stock are defined via the Resource_Pool table, with the part being defined against a Resource_Pool_Set. See Scheduling Concepts - Parts for more details.

Minor Enhancements¶

• When 'keep splits together' is set for co-requisite activities, if one of the activities ends earlier than the other, a split will be applied at this time to ensure that both visits end at the same time. Previous behaviour only enforced that return visits would start at the same time.
• Two new endpoints have been added to retrieve the details and descriptions of schedule exception types (one to retrieve details of all exception types and one to retrieve the details of a specific one). See the Interface Guide for more details.
• Time zones are now supported in IANA format (in addition to Windows time zone identifiers). The PSO Workbench will display all time zones in IANA format. See the Interface Guide for more details.

Performance Comparison¶

The general scheduling performance of the 6.10 version has been measured and verified against the 6.9 version. Benchmarking results are included in an appendix to the Architecture and Sizing Guide.