@road, Inc.

Vidus Limited

Dionisios Pothos

Ian S Alletson

Robert N W Laithwaite

Geoff Lowndes

Robert Nw Laithwaite

Tasks (T) such as repair jobs on a telecommunications system, that are to be performed by a plurality of resources such as field engineers (E), at different locations in a geographical area (), are scheduled by means of a scheduler () at a work manager server (). The scheduler provides schedule data () corresponding to schedules of the tasks that individual ones of the resources are to carry out, from task data () concerning the tasks to be carried out and resource data () concerning characteristics of resources available to carry out the tasks over a given period. Not all the tasks are scheduled, resulting in unscheduled task data (). The schedule data () is downloaded to a workstation () together with the unscheduled task data. The downloaded data is analysed at the workstation to determine a candidate resource (E) to perform the task (T) corresponding to the unscheduled task data.

Handling unscheduled tasks in a scheduling process

Tasks (T) such as repair jobs on a telecommunications system, that are to be performed by a plurality of resources such as field engineers (E), at different locations in a geographical area (), are scheduled by means of a scheduler () at a work manager server (). The scheduler provides schedule data () corresponding to schedules of the tasks that individual ones of the resources are to carry out, from task data () concerning the tasks to be carried out and resource data () concerning characteristics of resources available to carry out the tasks over a given period. The scheduled tasks are provided with associated contingency values (C) which are each computed as a function of the difference between the time that a task is scheduled to start and the latest start time that is feasible for the task . The schedule data () is downloaded to a workstation (). The downloaded data is displayed on a Gantt Chart and the task blocks on the display are colour coded according to their contingency values (C) to give a visual indication of their values.

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Dionisios Pothos