Heuristic Methods for the Appointment Booking System

To schedule appointments, the ABS can use the following heuristic methods:

• Earliest First. The earliest available time slots are selected for the set. The ABS examines each person in the schedule to find the first open slots after the date in Earliest Start field. This method can provide the fastest response for an activity. Companies that book activities for the same day prefer this method because it maximizes the amount of work service engineers perform.

• Resource Loading. Time slots are selected so that the schedules for employees are completed 1 employee at a time, to the extent possible. If multiple qualified employees are available, then the time slots for the employee with the most complete (filled-up) schedule are selected for the set. Companies primarily use this heuristic method for scheduling partners or on-call resources when they want to use as few resources as possible to meet the service needs.

  Tip: You can configure the number of time slots returned in response to the request by using the ABS - Default Number of Slots parameter.

• Resource Leveling. Time slots are selected so that the schedules for qualified employees are evenly loaded, to the extent possible. Companies use this heuristic method when they employ salaried field service engineers who must work when scheduled.

  Note: Selecting this heuristic method does not mean that the time slots for all employees in the schedule appear. Multiple slots from the same employee might appear if that employee is more lightly loaded.