Lock Selected Activities in Bulk Routing

You can prevent preassigned activities from being unscheduled or rescheduled during optimization by a bulk routing run. This eliminates unnecessary changes in the activity assignment and retains the existing activities in the route.

Changes have been made to the translations within the filter section of Optimization Strategy section. This table lists the old and new translations within the filter section:

Old translation	New translation
Filter parameters	Preassigned activities handling rules
Activities	Preassigned activities filter
Destination	Possible routing actions
Destination of unassigned activities	Possible routing actions
Non-scheduled activities in the routing bucket	Unschedule and move to the routing bucket
Activities in the routing bucket	Move to the routing bucket
Preassigned non-scheduled activities	Unschedule and leave in the same route
Resources' routes	Reassign to another route
Prevent optimization *	Do not move to the routing bucket and do not reassign
To reorder activities, drag and drop the grid rows	To reorder rules, drag and drop the grid rows

To prevent rescheduling selected activities to another resource or day or to prevent unscheduling of selected activities to bucket by means of bulk routing, follow these steps:

1. Make sure you've a filter describing such activities.
2. Select the Do not move to the routing bucket and do not reassign option for the Possible routing actions of the given Optimization strategy filter.
3. Corresponding activities may not be assigned to another resource due to routing optimization. Routing engine doesn't change the planned start time of such activities. However, Routing may insert other activities before if there's enough time for them.
4. You may use this functionality effectively to lock the activities or to imitate the En route status for activities not eligible for fully pledged En route status usage.

For example, you may like to create a special property Locked (Yes/No) for an activity, and have two action buttons - Lock and Unlock, setting the property values correspondingly. If you've filter Locked activities, filtering those activities having Locked set to Yes, you may add this filter to the Optimization strategy filters for a routing plan allowing activities to be moved between routes and/or being reordered within the same route.

Mobile Workers may lock the activity by clicking Lock when it was aligned with the customer that this particular resource at this particular time will do the activity.

Then, activities having Locked = Yes before routing will retain their ETA and resource assignment unchanged. Moreover, if an activity has had Locked = No when routing started, but changed the Locked value to Yes after routing started, but before routing results were applied, such an activity will not be changed by the routing results and thus retain the same ETA and assignment it had.

However, a manual intervention to routes during the time of routing run may lead to suboptimal routing results, so ensure that you've regular recurrent routing runs to constantly re-optimize the routes.

You can prevent activities from being reassigned or their ETA changed. Follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the Optimization strategy filter.
2. In the Preassigned activities handling rules dialog box, click the Do not move to the routing bucket and do not reassign for the Possible routing actions check box of the selected Optimization strategy filter.