September 2024

The following changes were released to On-Call Optimizer in September 2024.

4 Sep 2024 - Schedule balance and assignment quality statistics

On-Call Optimizer now provides detailed statistics on the balance and assignment quality of a schedule to assist in the understanding and management of a schedule.

Schedule balance is calculated and managed over the mid to long term timeframe and ensures that each member of the schedule is assigned a proportionate share of the total number of shifts.

Assignment quality is calculated and managed for each individual assignment and takes care of ensuring that member’s availability information is respected, shifts are not too close together and many other related factors.

More details regarding schedule balance…

More details regarding assignment quality…

Balance improvements for schedules with partial shift swaps

In conjunction with the new balance statistics now being reported, the handling of partial shift swaps has been improved to ensure that the balance of the schedule is maintained even when partial swaps are required.

Prior to these improvements balance was calculated by counting the number of shifts of each type assigned to each member, with fractional swaps resulting in many different types of shifts of varying duration being created and balance being managed within each type individually.

The improved approach maintains a record of the original shift type any partial shift originated from so the appropriate fractional share of the shift can be accounted to the member in the balance calculation.