S-068-V5-EN
The Duty Types preference defines the structure of your duties. It allows you to set duty start and end times, minimum and maximum paid time, and other key parameters.
Configuring Duty Types
While in your schedule, open Preferences
.Find Duty Types in the Drivers section or by using the search bar.
Click Add Preference at the bottom.
A preference instance called Default will open. By default, duty types created here are not allowed.
To allow a duty type in the schedule, select Yes in the Allowed field.
Any duty types you do not define will be considered Other (undesired) duties. Manually created duties will also fall into this category and will trigger validation issues by default.
Click Add Type to start defining duty types.
The following information can be added to this preference to define which duties are applicable for this duty type:
Field | Description |
Name | The name of the duty type. Each name must be unique. |
Description | A short description of the duty type. |
Changeover | Specify whether changeovers are allowed in this duty type. |
Split | Specify whether splits are allowed in this duty type. |
Allowed | Indicate if this duty type is allowed in the schedule. |
Penalty | If you want the duty type to be allowed but marked as undesirable, set a penalty to apply when it is used. |
Start | The earliest and latest start time allowed for this duty type. |
End | The earliest and latest end time allowed for this duty type. |
Paid | The range of paid time for this duty type. |
Work | The minimum and maximum work hours for this type. |
Spread | The minimum and maximum length of the duty. |
To define a time range for a duty type (such as Start or Paid), first check the box next to the parameter. If the box is not checked, your values will not be applied.
Custom and designed time definitions
While defining the properties of a duty type, you can also use custom time definitions - both created with the Time Definitions preference and the Time Definition Designer.
To do so, click + Custom time definition button. Open the drop-down list, and you will see all your custom and designed time definitions in there. Click on the one you need and set its time range like you did with the rest.
Note: when doing this, make sure there is no overlap between the Time Limitations and Duty Types preferences. The Time Limitations preference applies time limits to a time definition across all duties. Therefore, if you limit a time definition there, there is no need to add that definition in the Duty Types preference, as it will be overridden anyway.
Tips and best practices
When defining time ranges, use an average duty as a reference instead of an “ideal” one.
The Duty Types preference also lets you specify duties to help with rostering.
You may define Straight and Split duties here, but when rostering, you might also need separate rosters for Early and Late duties, Split and Part-time duties, and others.In the Spread field, make sure you define the lower limit of the duty’s spread time. This prevents short duties from being generated during optimization.
Define duty types that cover all times of the day to avoid generating unwanted duties.
The order of duty types matters. Duties are applied based on the order they appear in the list, with higher-positioned duties taking priority over lower ones.
Example: If you define three duty types: General, Early, and Late, General is created first and has no time limitations, so any duty can fall under it. Since it’s first on the list, all duties will be categorized as General even if they meet the conditions for Early or Late.
To change the order of duties, hover over a duty and use the arrows on the right to move it up or down until the desired order is set.
Another way to indicate which duty types are preferred is to assign higher penalties to less desirable duties and lower (or no) penalties to preferred duties.
Penalties
If you use the optimization engine, here are some ways of adding penalties while keeping the optimization process quick.
Limiting duty numbers per type
Instead of setting monetary penalties, limit the number of duties you want to have per type. You can do that by using one of the following:
Global Constraints preference (Total duty type count template).
For example, if you aim for 90 duties, and the optimization produces exactly 90, that means it was cost-effective. Then you can gradually reduce the desired number of duties to check what number gets the most cost-effective result with optimization.
Setting equal penalties for all duties
Setting the same penalty amount for all duties can be effective. For example, you can tie it to the Hourly wage from the Cost Preferences.
If the hourly wage is 20, you can multiply it by 3 and set 60 as the penalty for all duty types. This means that during optimization, adding a duty would cost an amount equivalent to 3 hours of the hourly wage in addition to the duty cost.
Using daily fixed cost
Alternatively, you can keep the penalty at 0 and instead add a default Driver daily fixed cost in the Cost Preferences. Similar to the previous example, if the hourly wage is 20, you can multiply it by 3 and set 60 as the fixed cost.
This will have the same effect on optimization as option 2, but instead of using penalties, it is controlled through cost. This way you do not have to update the penalty amount for each duty type or the hourly wage. Instead, you can update everything in one place using the Driver daily fixed cost field.
Note that if you have guarantee time set in your time definition, it is recommended to set the penalty to 0 for duty types and instead manage the number of duties using Global Constraints or the Preference Designer.
Consider a scenario with different duty types assigned to different preference groups. Let’s say you have a preference group that can only do splits. The default setup is that all the duty types are set to all preference groups as seen on the top right side of the duty type:
Note: a preference group can only be set for one duty type at a time. For example, the School preference group cannot be set for both Duty Type 1 and Duty Type 2 preference simultaneously.
Changing Duty types manually
Once you have an optimization result and each duty has a duty type assigned to it, you can modify the types of generated duties manually.
In the Gantt, check the boxes next to the duties you want to modify.
Click Batch Edit (the pencil icon above).
Open Hidden stats.
In the Duty type drop-down select the desired type.
Click Apply.
Results Evaluation
To evaluate your schedule in terms of duty types, use the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) dashboard at the top of the Scheduling screen. The following KPIs provide relevant metrics:
Duties
Duty Types
Duties Paid Time
Duty Preference Groups
You can also click on specific KPIs for more details. For example, clicking the Duty Types KPI shows the number of duties per type.
