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Scheduling Enhancements

Schedule Dispatch Service Enhancements

The Schedule Dispatch Service is a rule-based engine that suggests when an allocated activity should be committed to a resource (and so sent to the resource's mobile device). The rules that can be applied have been extended in the following ways:

  • Activity Type Overrides: It is now possible to override the basic commit rules (time horizon and maximum committed activities) based on the activity type. This can be used to commit activities of a certain type either sooner or later than regular activities. In addition, this override can be used to limit the number of activities of a certain type that can be committed to a resource, e.g. to prevent a resource from having more than one committed activity of the specified type.
  • Future Shifts: It is now possible to commit activities multiple days into the future, using a new 'ShiftsInFuture' attribute. This is to allow the schedule dispatch service to be used to suggest commitments even where resources need to have confirmed routes several days in advance.
  • Bucket Resources: The dispatch service is now able to suggest when activities should be committed to bucket class resources (e.g. for external contractors). In this case the entire shift will be committed at once when the commit criteria is met.
  • Rule Window: The dispatch rules can now be configured to only apply during 'business hours', e.g. between 8am and 5pm Monday to Friday. The exact times and days on which the rules apply is configurable.

In addition, a change has been made to the parameter 'MaximumDecisionFrequency' to allow this to be set independently for each organisation, or even for different datasets based on the dataset profile.

For more details see the Scheduling Concepts - Status Changes Guide.

Predictive Durations

Improvements have been made to the existing predictive duration functionality. This functionality uses historical actual duration information from the Schedule Archive reporting tables to determine duration estimates for new activities.

  • Spatial grouping: Two further grouping criteria have been included into the calculation: the location id and the location 'spatial key'. The first of these allows for a more accurate expected duration to be applied for locations that are visited repeatedly over time. The second allows for regional variations in the expected duration of activities to be accounted for. The spatial key is a calculated value based on the latitude and longitude of the activity location. Each of these criteria can be applied in combination with the existing criteria of activity type, customer and contract.
  • Confidence calculation: Improvements have been made to the calculation of the 'confidence level', which is used to determine the order of preference in which estimates are applied. By default, estimates will only be used where there is a high degree of confidence that the automatically calculated value is better than the value provided in the input.
  • Enable by default: A new parameter 'AutoDurationEnabled' has been added which allows auto duration calculations to be used by default, without having to be explicitly requested in the input data.

For full details see the Schedule Archive Guide.

Shift Cut-Off

A new 'shift cut off' option can be specified against a shift to prevent the DSE from scheduling new allocated activities into the shift after the current schedule time has passed the specified interval.

This is primarily intended for use with bucket resources, to prevent the DSE from allocating further work to a bucket shift once the work for that shift has been finalised (and perhaps sent to an external contractor).

The option could also be used for regular resources however, for example to prevent them from being allocated new work once they are in the final hour of their shift.

Performance Comparison

The general scheduling performance of the 6.9 version has been measured and verified against the 6.8 version. Benchmarking results are included in an appendix to the Architecture and Sizing Guide.