Reference: Optimization Engine Performance Recommendations
This topic provides guidelines and configuration settings to help you improve the performance of the schedule generation process.
Configuration
| Description
|
Decreasing the number of workers in each scheduling organization. | Simplifies and speeds up the schedule generation process. |
Tightening the minimum and maximum daily shift lengths. | Reduces the variations of shifts that you're sending to the Optimization Engine. The smaller the range of minimum and maximum shift lengths, the more flexibility the engine has to create labor demand. |
Using a larger demand period length. | Decreases the number of labor demand variables. Workday recommends using a 30 minute or 1 hour demand period for optimal performance. Example: A 15 minute demand period length will increase the potential shift start time by 50% more compared to a 30 minute period length. |
Configuring specific availability for workers. | Significantly improves performance (even if you only configure it for 50% of the workers in a tenant). When workers are available anytime, it increases the potential solutions the engine must evaluate. |
Using the Consistency setting. | Prioritizes solutions where workers maintain consistent shift assignments across multiple weeks, which enhances engine performance. |
Eliminating meals or adjusting meal placement windows. | Eliminating meal placements by having a no-meal configuration improves performance. Meal placements multiply the number of potential shifts, and when there is a large meal placement window, it increases the meal placement options and the number of schedule variations the Optimization Engine is churning through. If meals are required, use a 2 slot window for meal placements. |
Using budget as a constraint. | Reduces possible schedule variations by forcing the engine to choose a solution within the budget constraints. Turn on the Budget setting and use budget as a constraint (clear the Exceed Labor Budget setting on the Edit Scheduling Settings task). |
Limiting schedule tags on workers. | Limits the shifts workers qualify for, reducing the number of potential schedules the engine evaluates. |
Setting
| Description
| Location
|
Allow Meals as Gaps
| Instructs the engine to treat scheduled meals as covered time, not coverage gaps. When enabled, the Schedule Workers report doesn’t display meals as undercoverage blocks. Improves performance by reducing the number of variations the engine must evaluate during schedule generation. | Edit Scheduling Settings > Scheduling Engine Settings > Allow Gaps for Meals
|
Enable Single Meal Placement
| Instructs the engine to only generate the first valid meal placement slot for any eligible shift, rather than evaluating many different options. This setting is ideal for organizations that offer workers flexible (ad-hoc or demand-based) meal times, but still require a meal to be scheduled for shifts that meet meal criteria. This setting works effectively together with the Allow Meals as Gaps setting. | Edit Scheduling Settings > Scheduling Engine Settings > Enable Single Meal Placement
|
Enable Time Out Override
| ncreases the time available for the Optimization Engine to run, allowing up to 10 minutes for each attempt (maximum of 3 attempts). This provides the engine more opportunity to find an optimal schedule solution before timing out. You can use this setting together with asynchronous schedule generation using the Mass Generate Schedules for Organizations task to run schedule generation as a background job. | Edit Tenant Setup - Scheduling > Enable Time Out Override
|