The automatic assignment of resources is based on a "constraint solver" using a non-deterministic algorithm whose purpose is to provide the assignment of technicians and material resources for the selected work orders and which correspond to the assignment criteria defined in the assignment engine.

The automatic resource assignment action is only accessible if you have the "Start automatic resource assignment" profile right and the user has the right to change work orders.

General operation of the constraint solver

When the solver starts to look for solutions, there is no indication of how and when to stop. In order to find a balance between the relevance of the generated solution and the execution time needed to find an acceptable solution, a stopping mechanism is set.

This mechanism makes it possible to observe the qualitative change in the solutions provided by the solver. Each generated solution is assessed and assigned a score based on several criteria. The optimization stopping mechanism will observe the change in the scores attributed to each solution.

As the improvement of the solutions becomes increasingly difficult over time, if no solution generated outperforms the best solution found during a period of time (defined in the module settings) the optimization will then stop.

Weighting constraints

High-level constraints

• A technician must be assigned to a resource based on the technician's availability,
• A technician cannot be assigned to more than one resource at the same time,
• The assignment is limited by the work order dates,
• The assignment must comply with the team and/or the discipline and/or the technician indicated.

Low-level constraints

• Use as few technicians as possible.
• Give preference to the exact time defined. However, solutions are also assessed with schedules around the defined time while minimizing the solution score. The configuration is carried out through module settings (WO_OPTA_PERIOD, WO_OPTA_STEP).

A solution must comply with all high-level constraints. The low-level constraints allow the solution score to be minimized or maximized.

Initiation constraints

• The work order must be in a state belonging to a state family other than TERMINATE / CLOSE / ARCHIVE / CANCEL.
• For each labor or material resource line desired, the following must be filled in:
  
  • At least one team and/or discipline and/or technician,
  • A date and time,
  • A period.
• The calendars of technicians must be entered.

Scenarios

1. Fill in the data for the work order while complying with the constraints,
2. Initiate the "Automatic assignment of resources" action,
   --> a message informs you that the action has been initiated in asynchronous mode and that a memo is generated on completion of processing,
3. On completion of processing in asynchronous mode, a memo is generated indicating the automatic assignment status:
   --> Automatic assignment completed: this type of memo appears when the automatic assignment was able to be carried out for at least one work order. A link allows you to open the list of work orders where an assignment has been made.
   --> Automatic assignment impossible: this type of memo appears when the automatic assignment has not been able to carry out an assignment for all the work orders, either because the initiation constraints were not filled in, or because no solution was found