Equipment

The Equipment section of the AI Scheduler is the area where all physical equipment relating to the Schedule is stored and maintained.

Equipment can be anything from a production line, to an individual machine through to a small device or tool.

To access the Equipment Configuration area, you will need to select the Configurations menu in the header, select the configuration template that you wish to edit and then click on the Equipment menu on the left.

You will See a list of equipment. You can also search and filter on Equipment.

Equipment Classes

Equipment Classes are groupings of Equipment that can be linked to Operations. The Equipment Class is the specification of a Resource that is listed in the Bill of Equipment to create a product or perform a function.

If you have multiple instances of a particular type of Equipment, each Equipment instance can be part of the same class. When Scheduling, the software will be able to utilise any instance of that Equipment Class to fulfil the Operation.

For example a manufacturing facility may have a range of Injection Moulding machines of different sizes. The 50 tonne machines may all be able to produce similar products using the same tooling, therefore you could group each 50t machine into the "50t Injection Moulding" Class and the Optimiser and Scheduling system will utilise the most appropriate instance of that equipment class to fulfil an Order.

To create and update Equipment Classes, click on the Manage Classes icon and Add, Update or Delete:

To Create a new piece of Equipment click the + button and enter the Name and Description:

Once a piece of equipment has been created you can then apply a Class to the equipment. Equipment can belong to as many classes as required.

For example a Pump may be a generic resource that is used by a number of different operations with different characteristics, therefore it may have a generic class "Pump" where it can be used for any pumping function, or a specific class "10hp Pump" where an Operation specifically needs a pump with 10hp.

You can also apply Availability Templates to a piece of equipment to give it an Availability or Shift:

When applying an Availability to an Equipment, you need to provide a date range for that shift. A resource can have different shifts at different times, requiring the need to "calendarise" the Availabilities over time.

Equipment will also likely have Planned Maintenance or Downtimes associated that need to be created to ensure the system does not Schedule Production on that resource while it is out of action. To add a Downtime or Planned Maintenance Event, add a date and time for the outage period: