Applying Hard and Soft Rules

Hard rules are rules that must be adhered to in order for a run to be legal, (for example, Minimum and Maximum parameter values). These rules are determined by your transit site policies and union contract agreements.

Soft rules represent preferable values or establish a preferable range of values within which you would like BlockBuster to provide results or what would be acceptable if BlockBuster did. Occurrence, Cumulative and Worst Case values when they fall in between the minimum and maximum can be classified as Soft rules. See Penalties.

Parameter listings that suggest a “soft” usage can be made “harder” by applying larger penalties and by applying the same penalty on either side.

For example, to create 91 runs of a specific type, perform the following steps:

  1. In the Group table in the Parameters screen, select Run Type.
  2. In the Group member table, select the appropriate run type.
  3. In the Situation table, select Number of Runs.
  4. In the Parameters table, type “91” in both the Lower limit and Upper limit fields.
  5. In the Lower limit penalty and Upper limit penalty fields, type “$1000”. After cutting the runs, you discover that 95 runs of this type were created.
  6. Increase the amount of the penalty on either the lower or upper limit until the penalty is sufficient to produce 91 runs of the selected run type.