The AMC Barrel Allocator Demonstration

Options for Unassignable Missions

Eventually, given resource availability, it will not be possible to allocate resources for some of the missions without disrupting something else in the schedule. The Allocator will mark these missions as UNASSIGNABLE and will place them in a special sheet labeled UNASSIGNABLE.

The Barrel Allocator provides a number of options to automatically allocate these unassignable missions. Any of the commands under the mission window Options menu will automatically apply to the entire set of selected missions. For example, you can decide that you want to delay all missions, or that you want all missions to bump lower priority missions. Or any combination of those. The system also allows the comparison of all different alternatives for a particular mission. Use the preference window to select the options and the desired parameter. Use the command Options | Compare Options to view all alternatives. In the example below, we asked the system to compute all options to allocate mission 698DA-WMD1-2

The view above presents the result of each relaxation option and a summary of the impact caused by each decision. Each option can be expand by clicking on the triangle on the left side of the row. By inspecting the bumping results, notice that some missions of type LOCAL will be bumped in this case. Local missions are not under the jurisdiction of the Barrel. They belong to the wing. Since we do not want to touch local missions, we go back to the preference window and check the box that tells the system to ignore local missions while bumping. We also de-select all other relaxation options but bumping. We cancel these options by double clicking on the red CANCEL line, and re-do the compare options. Now only the bumping option is computed.

Now that we do not have any local missions being bumped, we select one of the options by double-clicking on the left side of the option. Now mission CHARLIE 339 is left out of the schedule and marked as unassignable.

After manually choosing one of the relaxation options computed by the system, we can ask the system to automatically perform some relaxation. We elect the remaining missions in the UNASSIGNABLE sheet and ask the system to automatically bump lower priority missions.

The result is two 3B1 missions are now marked unassignable. We then select both of them and ask the system overallocate the least committed wing. This options tells the system to consider fenced capacity as available capacity while trying to allocate the missions.

The result of the overallocation can be seen by selecting the two missions and using the mission window command Edit | Create Resource Window to inspect the wings to which these missions have been assigned.

In the resource view, the green band represents the time interval the selected missions have been allocated. We can see the periods of time that we need to go over the contract level to be able to support those two missions.

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Marcel Becker,
Last modified: Wed Nov 3 18:08:24 EST 1999