General Enhancements¶

The following general enhancements have also been made to the product:

Cyclic Operation Scheduling¶

It is now possible to use cyclic scheduling to schedule more complex patterns of maintenance. Here the work might involve multiple operations which to be performed, each with different recurrence rates. Each time a visit to an activity is scheduled one or more operations will be performed, and the selection of operations will affect how long the visit is likely to take and which resources are able to carry out the work.

Each operation can specify certain usage conditions to determine how often it should be carried out, and operations can be linked to each other in various ways.

For full details see the chapter on Cyclic Operation Scheduling in the Scheduling Concepts - Long-Term Scheduling.pdf.

Minor Enhancements¶

• RESTful Gateway API Changes: General improvements have been made to the Scheduling RESTful Gateway including; support for HTTP compression and returning the relevant content-type of a response body.
• RESTful Gateway Logging: Additional event logging has been added the Scheduling RESTful Gateway when a failure occurs.
• Log Account ID: Logs that are displayed in the Windows Event Viewer or in Azure Monitoring now display the organisation account id instead of the organisation id.
• Snapshot Data Compression: Archival snapshot and audit data will now always be saved in a compressed format, the parameter 'CompressArchiveData' has been removed.
• Default Mechanism Type: The default SLA mechanism_type within the SLA_Type schema entity will now be set to 'POWER_BASED'.
• Azure Monitoring Help: The Installation Guide now illustrates how to configure custom alert rules for Azure Monitoring, allowing for separation of system and data errors.
• XSD Files: XML Schema Definition files for the Scheduling and Modeling Schema have now been included in the release.
• .NET Core 3.1: PSO's software framework has now been updated to .NET Core 3.1.

Performance Comparison¶

A performance analysis of the DSE scheduling WISE problems was completed, this was done using generated test data that represents a typical WISE problem with a varying activity count. Full results are included in the appendix Further Performance Metrics to the Architecture and Sizing Guide.

A performance test of Distributed Scheduling was completed, comparing Distributed Scheduling and alternative approaches using a large dataset of 200,000 activities to be scheduled over 24 weeks. Full results are included in an appendix to the Architecture and Sizing Guide.

A performance analysis of Cyclic Scheduling mechanism was completed, this was done using generated test data that represents a typical cyclic scheduling problem. This was then compared to the standard scheduling approach. Full results are included in the appendix Further Performance Metrics to the Architecture and Sizing Guide.

The general scheduling performance of the 6.5 version has been measured and verified against the 6.4 version. Full benchmarking results are included in an appendix to the Architecture and Sizing Guide.