Understand scheduling for linear assets

Audience: Administrators and dispatchers

When you manually or automatically schedule a task on a linear asset, the system only calculates the technician's travel time to the start point of the asset. Since linear assets can include pipelines, roads, or railways, it takes time to physically travel along an asset segment. Directly incorporate the additional time it takes to reach the job site into the task’s duration.

Prerequisites

Before you start:

• To understand linear assets and their terms, see Understand linear assets.

• To make sure linear assets are configured, see Configure linear assets.

• If you want a new facility type to be a linear asset, check the linear asset flag when you configure the type. 

  • SeeManage facility types.

Understand how work orders are scheduled on linear assets

To schedule activities associated with linear assets, you need specific routing and travel calculations since the asset spans a physical distance and has start and end points.

Understand linear assets integration in work orders

When a work order (WO) is generated for a linear asset, the system automatically populates: 

• Start address.

• End address.

Standard address fields are included alongside the base coordinates, access points, and access times configured on the asset.

Understand manual scheduling

When you manually assign or schedule an activity on a linear asset, the system calculates the technician's travel path differently than it does for standard point assets.

• One-way routing: Manual scheduling assumes travel in one direction (from the start point to the end point). Entry and exit points cannot be reversed manually.

• Travel along the asset: The time required to travel along the linear asset (from start to end) must be included in the estimated activity duration. This is because movement along the asset often happens off-road and cannot be calculated by standard street routing.

Understand path calculations

When you insert a new task in a technician's schedule, the system calculates:

• Inbound path: Calculated from the previous task's location to the start point of the linear asset.

• Outbound path: Calculated from the end point of the linear asset to the beginning of the next scheduled activity.

• Access time: If an asset’s access time is defined, this duration automatically adds to the calculated travel time.

Understand types of coordinates

The system uses these coordinates to calculate travel paths on the scheduling interface:

Understand automatic scheduling

The system utilizes the scheduling engine for automatic scheduling, like:

• Virtual planning.

• Real-time reworking.

• Route optimization.

To accurately calculate paths, the core system passes specific geographical attributes to scheduling engine based on the asset type:

• ll (lat, lon): The geographical coordinates used for standard point assets.

• llEnter (latEnter, lonEnter): The starting point coordinates used for linear assets.

• llExit (latExit, lonExit): The ending point coordinates used for linear assets.

• invertible: A boolean value that indicates if the linear asset can also be traveled in reverse.

Manage access times in automatic scheduling

The scheduling engine can factor in off-road travel time required to physically reach the asset's exact coordinates from the approximation on the road network.

To account for this extra travel time, you can configure the project to send these attributes to the engine:

• accessTime: A general access time applied to the asset.

• accessTimeStart: A specific access time applied only to the arrival/start point.

• accessTimeEnd: A specific access time applied only to the exit/end point.

• accessTimePivot: A specific access time applied to any team pivot points.

What’s next

• See Configure linear assets (2).

• See Understand linear asset visualization on the map.