About Combining Week Day Runs with Day-Specific Runs

How do I combine runs that operate every week day with day-specific runs?

It makes life easier in PASS if you have subscription runs that operate every day of the week. In other words, you have runs that have a multi-day weekly date interval rule. At the same time, many sites will have predictable variances in required service levels on different days of the week.

ParaCutter helps you address this problem. To start, identify a baseline of service that will operate Monday through Friday. This is the service that you offer to your top drivers as steady work every day. If you can build a runcut just for this baseline service level, the runs that you get can be imported as runs that operate five days a week. Then, you need to go back and do a top-up runcut for each day of the week to produce the runs that are unique from one day to the next.

To assist in this, let us suppose that you would like a baseline that consists of 80% of your total service. When you set up a project in Prospector, do an analysis of all five week days for the period of interest. Enter a growth value of -20, which will result in the run projections on the Forecast-Grid being reduced by 20%. This means that your runcut will provide only 80% of the total service that you need. This will represent your baseline service. The runs created by this runcut can then be imported with a MTWRF date interval rule.

The second step is to do another runcut for each day of the week that provides a top-up of the daily service required specifically for that day of the week. This time, your Prospector project(s) should only look at one day of the week.

ParaCutter allows you to invoke your baseline runcut solution within Prospector when you are defining a daily top-up. When you are on the Info portion of Prospector, there is a field where you can select an existing runcut. Choose the baseline runcut. Then, when you get to the Forecast Grid, you will see all of the hourly runs that are part of that baseline netted out of the requested number of runs for the top-up. As a result, when you create a new runcut based on this Prospector project, it will not duplicate the runs that are already part of the core.

You will end up doing one top-up import for each day of the week in addition to the baseline multi-day import. It may be best not to do run name matching for the top-up import since you already have all of the baseline runs in place.