Allocation

Solutions

A team was set up to manage the project and to interface with the customer departments. A technical team was set up to development the improvements and adaptations necessary on the system. Here are listed the improvements and adaptations that had to be accomplished in the system.

1. It was necessary to adapt the application to run in 64Bits platform.

2. It was necessary to add tasks descriptions in the reports of jobs.

3. The solution algorithm had to be modified to generate a new solution file on each execution to avoid exception situations and consequent locking of the file.

4. The algorithm used to allocate the professionals to jobs was based on a mathematical model of mixed integer programming. Due to certain characteristic of this model there were some cases when a professional was overloaded compared to others of the same level. A smoothing algorithm had to be designed and implemented.

5. It was necessary to adapt the system to receive long duration jobs.

6. The e-mails application used on system was different from the application in use in the company. The system had to be adapted to use this other e-mails application. The objective was to informing each professional when he is allocated to a specific job.

7. The core of the professionals' allocation algorithm accessed each of the appointment application of each professional in order to know if the professional would have enough available time to work in a certain job. The appointment application used by the company was different, therefore it was necessary to adapt the application to consult this new tipe of appoint application in order to allocate professionals.

8. The application had a set of probes to monitor the customer systems. In case any of the monitored attributes a passing it normal parameters than a job was created. The system had also to receive tasks from an internal ticked administration tool. An interface using a messaging management product had to be developed to synchronize the ticket and jobs of both two systems.

9. The application was designed to work with different time zones and day light savings. There are countries as India that has time zones of only thirty minutes. The system had to be enhanced in order to correctly handle these types time zones.

10. The application used as set o probes to monitor the customer´s servers and the company had a commonly used collector system to retrieve almost the same information. It was necessary to build an interface between the system collector and the application.