March 2025

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

Assignment Groups

Assignment Groups provide a way to limit the members eligible to be assigned to a shift to a subset of the members in the schedule.

This allows for common use-cases such as gradually introducing new members to the schedule or reducing the workload of team members with additional duties to be managed directly within the schedule, where previously supporting these use-cases required creating additional nested schedule.

The nested schedule functionality remains available and can also be used together with assignment groups as required.

More details on setting up assignment groups can be found in the schedule configuration documentation.

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 are now weighted based on how much they overlap with a shift, providing more flexible and accurate schedule generation.

What’s Changing?

Previously, any amount of overlap between an availability entry and a shift resulted 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 would result in the entire week-long shift being preferred or blocked for the member!

On-Call Optimizer will now 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.

More details on how the weighting is applied can be found in the availablity documentation.

Bugfixes and minor changes

In addition to the changes described above, the following bug fixes and minor changes were also released in March 2025.

• The remove member icon is no longer hidden from view when a member cannot be removed from a schedule. The icon now uses styling to indicate if the users is removable or not, and provides an explanatory tooltip on hover with the reason removal is prevented when disabled.