IFS PSO : The Always-ON Optimization Engine

This is the first Article in the series on the IFS PSO architecture. In each subsequent article we break down a level further into what it comprises off and why this architecture enables PSO to be the best scheduling platform in the market.

The limitation with Batch Scheduling

IFS's Planning Scheduling and Optimization (PSO) product is not just the market leader in the scheduling and optimization space but it is the only product which offers a 100% always on, dynamic scheduling engine. 

Other software providers which tackle the scheduling problem primarily do it in a batch mechanism wherein a process kicks off at every x interval, runs for a period and ends when a satisfactory schedule is produced.

The problem with that approach is that by the time the schedule is created the underlying data on which the batch process initially started has changed, resulting in a not so efficient schedule, in some cases this would be as early as at the end of the batch run itself.

These new changes need to wait till the batch process restarts again and for businesses where there are a lot of in day changes this batch process scheduling is never able to catch up to the in-day changes resulting in jobs remaining unscheduled and requiring dispatchers to manual take actions and in doing so add more changes to the queue of the batch process and grinding the entire "automated" scheduling to a complete halt.

Always ON = Always scheduling = Always optimizing 

PSO's USP is that it is not just a batch or an interval-based scheduling process. PSO is an always on scheduling engine which means at any point PSO has in its "memory" the quality metrics of the overall scheduling at all times. When a new job comes in or when a change is made, PSO immediately runs several of its 30 algorithms to instantaneously figure out the most optimal change to make to the schedule to have the best overall schedule as compared to what it was before the change.

This always on approach gives PSO unmatched speed to keep up with the in-day changes and the result is a fully scheduled, fully optimized and little to none, manual intervention.

PSO is the only scheduling engine which delivers on the promise to move away the schedulers and dispatcher from building a schedule manually to managing and monitoring the schedule by acting on exceptions.