Allocation

Development of enhancements in a system of automatic allocation of resources

 

Execution

The list below shows the execution of the improvements and adaptations done in the system.

  1. To adapt the application to run on a 64Bits platform it was necessary to adapt the parts of the codes that invoked the operating system calls directly, so that we replace them by 64Bits calls.

  2. To add the description of tasks in the jobs it was necessary to modify the user interface and the database structure.

  3. To adapt of the allocation algorithm for generation it was necessary to modify the part of code that generated the solution file so that a new solution file was generated at each execution. Also, it was necessary to modify the reading functions and selection of the best solution.

  4. To avoid the overload of professionals it was necessary to developed an algorithm that analyzed the existence of some task that can be executed by more than a professional in such a way that if the task is reassigned than the function objective of the best solution did not change. In case it exists than each such task was reallocated to the less overloaded.

  5. To treat long duration jobs in the algorithm it was necessary to increase the window of consideration of jobs from 4 to 8 hours. The consequence was that the jobs that had duration greater than 4h would have chance to be allocated.

  6. To adapt the system to work with the internal e-mail application of the company it was necessary to built a new module that analyzed the allocations done on each solution found. If some allocation was different from the previous solution then an email was sent to the respective professional by this new module.

  7. To adapt the system to consider the internal personal commitments application of the company it was necessary to develop an agent that ran inside of the commitment application. This agent exported the professional calendar information to an external file. This file was than accessed by the system in order to know the professional's availability.

  8. To adapt the system to also receive jobs from the internal problem ticket application it was necessary to create an interface using a messaging product. When a ticket was modified than the interface was executed to transmit the information to the system. The contrary happened if a job was created or modified on the system. In doing that the tickets were always synchronized with the jobs.

  9. To correct the treatment of time zones and day light savings it was necessary to modify the user interface, the database structure and in the allocation algorithm.

  10. To adapt the system to use the internal monitoring application of the company it was necessary to developed special collectors to extract the information from the monitoring application and send the proper messages in the system in a specific format.