Creating Constraint Sets for Schedules

Service businesses must operate under numerous union, legal, or business constraints. For more information, see Examples of Constraints.

These constraints include the following types:

• Hard constraints. The ABS and Optimizer cannot violate hard constraints. Activities that do not fit these constraints are not scheduled. Consequently, the engines quickly find solutions, but fewer solutions are obtained. The solutions result in higher costs for service.

• Soft constraints. The Optimizer can weigh the cost of using or violating a soft constraint when calculating solutions for a schedule. Compared to hard constraints, soft constraints result in longer optimization times (lower performance of the Optimizer), more solutions, and lower costs for service. Violating soft constraints can result in a more costly schedule.

Schedules that violate hard constraints are discarded even though they might be better than other solutions. The Optimizer can use solutions that violate soft constraints, but it assigns a penalty to these violations that can make a solution less favorable than another solution. The calculated cost function for each solution includes the penalties for violating soft constraints. For more information, see Defining Cost Functions for the Optimizer.

To create constraint sets, perform the following procedures:

• Defining Constraints

• Defining Constraint Sets

This task is a step in Process of Administering Schedules Using Siebel Scheduler.