Advance Schedule Diagnosis & Troubleshooting Basics

Introduction

You will run into situations where your schedule is not running as you intended. There may be issues with your source paths, tasks, processes or dependencies. In this two-part series we will go through some schedule trouble-shooting techniques to identify the issues and rectify them.

To begin with, it is important to understand how Advance runs your source schedule. The schedule is run as follows

• Generates a Task list based on Processes and their associated Source Quantities
• Creates an ordered list of Tasks for each piece of Equipment based on the Source Path
• Generates Dependencies and applies them to each Task
• Simulation of the Task list from the Start till the End Date of your Scenario (this is much more complex than it is written but for our purposes is unimportant)

To be able to uncover how your schedule is behaving and diagnose any issues we will cover some preliminary checks you can conduct to identify the issue. If the scheduling issue is not uncovered by these steps, it is recommended to use the Snapshot viewer (Article- Schedule Troubleshooting-SnapShot viewer.)

FAQ: Why are my tasks not being done in the schedule?

There may not be enough time for your schedule is a possible explanation.

When a Scenario is created, Advance defaults to the current date as Schedule Start Date and adds a year to stipulate the Schedule End Date.

Tasks that will occur up to the schedule End date, and task after this date will not be scheduled. To rectify this, you can extend the schedule end date to a suitable time in the future that will allow all the tasks to be completed.

Remember that as you make adjustments to the schedule, the schedule end date may also become insufficient. It is good practice to check for unscheduled solids when you run a Scenario after schedule edits.

This will show the solids that have not been completed.

FAQ: I have allowed enough time for all the tasks, but some tasks are still not being completed.

Diagnosis 1: Check the Processes Configuration.

• Check if the relevant process exists in the scenario.
• Check if it is Active, a peer might have inadvertently turned it off. In-Active Processes will not be done.
• Audit the Source filter range, the range definition might exclude some nodes that are not being done.
• Audit the Default Source quantity field, this might refer to a non-existent table field or one that calculates to zero.
• Audit the Default task rate, ensure that it does not compute to a zero value.

Diagnosis 2: Check the Equipment Configuration.

Check the relevant Equipment Configuration under the Processes tab, ensure that the process is enabled (Active ticked) and there is an hourly rate assigned for the process.

Also check the Source path to ensure that the relevant nodes are included in the source paths.

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