The Appointment Booking Process
Appointment Booking is done using the Appointment Booking Engine (ABE). Note that this is a different application to the Dynamic Scheduling Engine (DSE), although the two work closely together.
If you simply wish to schedule activities at the most efficient times, then just send ordinary activities to the DSE. Appointment Booking should only be used when you want to consider putting an activity in several different time slots, and see which slots are possible and also which are the most cost-effective. Both Appointment Requests and ordinary activities etc. are supplied using the standard Scheduling Schema XML. A single input XML file may contain both ordinary activities and appointment booking records.
The purpose of the Appointment Booking Engine is to quickly estimate whether an activity is likely to be scheduled, were it to be sent to the DSE with an availability constrained to a specific time slot. The Appointment Booking Engine is designed to give a quick response to appointment requests (typically within a few seconds), but this is at the expense of accuracy: a small proportion of appointment offers may be made which then cannot be scheduled subsequently by the DSE. This is because the ABE makes its decisions based on the latest DSE plan, which may be a few seconds out of date. It is therefore important for the external application to check, once an appointment has been offered and accepted, that the activity is scheduled by the DSE within the next few minutes. If any accepted activities are not scheduled by the DSE, these should be raised as exceptions in the external application, and the appointment rearranged manually.
It is important to note that, whilst the DSE schedules activities to specific resources, the ABE does not give appointments for specific resources. The ABE is trying to determine whether the organisation has sufficient capacity to take an appointment at a certain time – it is not producing an optimised schedule that will determine exactly which resource to allocate to an activity.
The basic appointment booking process is described below:
1. The service-management system sends an Appointment Request to the scheduling system.
2. The Appointment Booking Engine replies with zero or more Appointment Offers
3. Non Blocking Requests Only: The service-management system accepts one of these offers using an Appointment Offer Response record. At this point no other changes should be made to the input
data, and the input_updated flag on the response should be set to false.
4. Non Blocking Requests Only: The Appointment Booking Engine will now verify that the chosen slot is still available and return an Appointment_Summary record to confirm or otherwise. If the offer is no
longer valid, the appointment booking process should be restarted.
5. The external system now confirms the offer the customer wishes to accept using an Appointment
Offer Response record. At the same time, the external system must raise the value of the activity
and constrain it to the appointment time.
6. The external system checks on all accepted appointments to ensure that they remain scheduled in the DSE. Any that drop out of the schedule must be manually resolved.
This is Test Comment