March 2025

The following changes were released to On-Call Optimizer in March 2025

Automatic Swap Requests

Members can now opt in to having swap requests automatically triggered for any shift that conflicts with a block in their availability information, helping to maintain schedule quality with minimal manual intervention.

There are two situations in which these types of conflicts can occur and from which an automatic swap request can be triggered:

1. When a new block conflicting with a previously assigned shift is added to one of the member’s configured calendars
2. When a new assignment chooses to assign a member to a shift that conflicts with an existing block (currently very rare, but will become more common due to the weighted availability changes described below)

In both cases, once the swap request has been triggered, the normal swap processing logic is followed to find another member able to accept the shift.

Automatic swap requests are disabled by default and must be turned on by each member from their profile page.

More details on this feature are available in the swap documentation.

Weighted Availability in Assignments

Availability preferences and blocks will soon be weighted based on how much they overlap with a shift, providing more flexible and accurate schedule generation.

What’s Changing?

Currently, any amount of overlap between an availability entry and a shift results in the entire shift being blocked or preferred for that member. In the case of schedules with a weekly shift pattern, this means that a single hour preference or block event on a member’s calendar could result in the entire week-long shift being preferred or blocked for the member!

In the future, On-Call Optimizer will weight these overlaps proportionally when considering the cost/benefit of assigning each shift to a particular member:

• A 1-hour block occurring within a week long (e.g. 168 hour) shift will contribute less than 1% of its current impact on the algorithm.
• A 4-hour preference in a 24-hour shift will contribute 17% of its current impact on the algorithm.
• A full-day block overlapping a daily shift shift will be unchanged and continue to contribute 100% of it’s current impact on the algorithm.

This change will be rolled out in coordination with schedule owners during March to ensure schedule members are aware of the changing behaviour and have time to adjust their availability information on their calendars if desired.

Please get in touch if you’d like to opt in to the change early.