Alternative Resource Selections

Suppose you were scheduling a task that required Joe Jones and one other programmer.  There are three other programmers  who are qualified.  To find the scheduling possibilities you must consider all combinations of Jones and each of the others.

Now if each programmer already has multiple assignments of different lengths, finding the possible schedule times is challenging.  The leading resource schedulers not only have difficulty scheduling multiple resources, but finding all possibilities when the second programmer is a “wild card” is nearly impossible with these systems.

The FAST system finds all possible combinations of resources, determines the availability of each, and presents all possibilities to the scheduler.  It does this by allowing the user to specify one or more “wild card” resource requirements.  When entering a resource requirement for an activity, the user simply selects the “ANY” option from the menu.

Now if Jones was not required explicitly, the FAST system would find all combinations of the four programmers taken two at a time.  It would look at simultaneous availability of each of the six combinations and present all the feasible scheduling options.

Here are a few examples where the wild card option has been used:

–  In a hospital surgery scheduling application, we wild carded the operating rooms because any surgeon could perform the required surgery in          any of them.

–  In a sports scheduling application, two referees were needed for each match.  The selection was wild-carded.

–  In a manufacturing application, a specific lathe operator was needed, but there were several machines that could perform the activity.

Recall from the previous four blog posts that the requirements for individual resources can be time varying within an activity.  So finding simultaneous availability for a combination of resources with this flexibility is challenging.  The FAST logic does this and does it FAST!  Because of this, the FAST system finds schedules that other systems cannot.  They are Unique Scheduling Solutions!

The wild card capability has been found useful in almost all applications including health care scheduling, hospitality industry event scheduling, manufacturing scheduling, education scheduling, sports scheduling, capacity planning, project scheduling and many others.

The next post will describe how priorities are handled differently in the FAST system.  Be sure to read all the posts in the next few days to see how we can handle applications that other systems cannot.