Availability Windows¶

Activities can be linked to availability sets, which are comprised of individual availability windows. Specific scheduling constraints can be applied for the duration of the window.

Single Resource Limitation¶

The availability set can be configured to only permit one resource per availability window. This means that across all of the activities linked to the set, any activities allocated within an availability window must be allocated to the same resource. A different resource may be used for the next availability window, as the restriction only lasts for the length of the window.

This means that, for example, maintenance windows could be defined in which a set of maintenance activities may be carried out. The DSE is then free to choose which windows the maintenance activities are scheduled into. Not all of the activities linked to the set need to be scheduled to the same window, but each window would just have one resource working on the maintenance.

This allows a single resource to handle the maintenance whenever maintenance needs to be carried out, without restricting all of the maintenance across the entire schedule to go to the same resource.

In an aviation context, the availability window could define when a plane is at an airport and therefore available to have maintenance carried out on it. Each resource be a parallel resource, representing a hangar in which the maintenance can occur. The 'one resource per availability' limitation could ensure that the maintenance is not scheduled to two hangars simultaneously while the plane is at the airport.

Costs¶

We can now assign costs to the use of availability windows. These are:

• Availability Cost: A cost can be applied once per used availability window, regardless of the number of activities scheduled within it.
• Availability Visit Cost: A cost can be applied for each activity scheduled within an availability window.

Two new optional columns 'availability_cost' and 'availability_visit_cost' have now been added to both 'Availability_Set' and 'Availability_Set_Item' scheduling schema tables.