Offset Resource Requirements

In the last post. we described how the FAST scheduler removes the difficulties that resource schedulers get into when users want to schedule multiple resources to accomplish a task, project, or activity.  In that post, we said that the FAST system will find all intervals when a set of required resources are available simultaneously.  That is, the FAST system schedules activities that can require multiple resources.  In this post, we describe how the resource requirements for scheduling an activity can be staggered or offset so that they don’t necessarilyline up with the entire duration of the activity.  This is best understood by showing some examples.

Suppose you are scheduling surgical procedures and the required resources are surgeons, nurses, an operating room, and some equipment. Suppose also that this is a complicated surgery that requires several different surgical specialist but none for the entire duration of the procedure. The activity might require one surgeon to prep and open the patient in the first hour and then a transplant specialists for the next 3 hours and a third specialist to close the patient.  It would be inaccurate to specify the requirements for these surgeons to last the entire duration of the procedure.  A less traumatic example might be the scheduling of a working meeting that requires the VP t0 attend for the first few minutes but not the entire length of the meeting.  Or consider scheduling a dinner event might require set-up people for the first 2 hours and servers for the remainder of the event.  Perhaps the set up people must return to take down the tables and chairs for the last one hour and 45 minutes of the activity.  A service call might require two technicians, – but neither for the entire duration of the repair activity.  You can see that offsets in the requirements for resources are important to model accurately if the real capacity is to be described.  Failure to model activities and their required resources accurately can lead to grossly underestimating the capacity of the enterprise you are scheduling.  This translates into unnecessary expense.  We have seen examples where, over time, thousands of dollars were spent unnecessarily because the scheduling system didn’t model an activity’s resource requirements realistically.

So now envision a set of intervals that represent requirements for each resource, and those intervals are staggered and disjoint (i.e. on and off) and then realize that there are many such resources  associated with each activity.  Can you find the start times where all the required resources are simultaneously available with the right offsets?  The FAST system does this and provides the set of all possibilities to the decision maker.  That decision maker is either a user who is doing manual scheduling (one-at-a-time) or decision logic that is resident in the system (automated scheduling).

We cannot over-emphasize the importance of resource requirement offsets.  In many cases, a simple scheduling environment evolves into a more complex one as users discover the need to be more precise and accurate about what they need.  The FAST system can certainly handle the simplest resource scheduling job, (e.g. simple staff scheduling, appointment booking etc.),  but it can also accommodate the more detailed and accurate activity models that most environments evolve into.  It is best to start with a scheduling application that can accommodate more detailed modelling as it is needed.

Now what about resources that are required in quantities greater than one?  See the next post on how FAST handles “Pooled Resources” !