Resource groups acts in many ways like normal resources. However, they of cause have an important ability to act as a parent for member resources.
Resource groups can be modeled for many different usages and play an important role when it comes to solving real-world scheduling challenges.
Visual effects affected by resource groups
- Resource groups names are shown in bold in the Gantt chart – member resources with an indent.
- The available hours on workload graphs depends on the resource level “Calendar factor”
Scheduling functionality affected by resource groups
- The resource alternatives for an operation. I.e. if a group is listed as an alternative, then all members of the group also become alternatives (this behavior can be changed with resource level flag “Alternatives from the group” )
- The resource level “Priority” parameter determines in which sequence member resources are selected
- The shift calendar may be configured to be an aggregated sum of the shift calendars for all member resources.
This is an overview of different scheduling use cases and how they are solved by configuring the resource groups in different ways.
| Mode | Use case | Group calendar | When and how to use |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Operation scheduled to group | Fixed calendar | When a resource group represents 2 or more members (machines/persons) – and the number and availability of the members is fixed (never changes). In this mode configure a resource group without members. Assign a named shift calendar to the resource group. Set the resource calendar factor to e.g. 2. This will allow 2 operations with operation efficiency 1 to be planned in parallel – or a single operation with operation efficiency 2 |
| 2 | Operation scheduled to group | Calendar based on members | When a resource group represents 2 or more members (machines/persons) – and the number and availability of the members is varying (changes from day to day or week to week). In this case, configure each member resource with appropriate calendar information and add the different members to the group. On the resource group, select calendar “Calendar based on group members” The calendar factor cannot be manually assigned in this mode, as it will be automatically calculated from period to period, based on the calendar factor assigned to the member resources. Operations for this resource should be configured with advanced setting “Block resource change during scheduling”. Also, operations should be initially assigned at route level to the resource group in question. Model shift calendars individually for the different members. In this mode, the net effect is, that the resource group has a variable calendar factor and variable open/close calendar periods. All being the aggregated sum of all the members |
| 3 | Operation scheduled to named member | Fixed calendar | When you never want operations to be scheduled to the group level – i.e. operations should be scheduled to best possible named member. In this case, configure each member resource with appropriate calendar information and add the different members to the group. On the resource, the group assigns a relevant named calendar – a calendar with openings that are somewhat similar to the members. Set the calendar factor of the group to 0. This will ensure that the resource group has no capacity – including zero available hours when viewed on workload graphs Select an appropriate Scheduling mode for the resource group. E.g. “Earliest/latest” etc |
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