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Designating work groups for auto-balancing of robot workload

Updated on February 12, 2021

Determine whether Pega Robot Manager can move robots between work groups in your application, based on the service-level agreement (SLA) of assignments and robot availability. To ensure that robots are allocated to complete essential assignments first, you can include work groups in automatic workload balancing and determine the work group priority.

Work group priorities

Auto-balancing uses work group priorities to determine how to assign robots when the system does not have enough available robots to complete the work on time.

As a robot administrator, you can assign one of the following SLA priority values to each work group. These priority values indicate to the Auto-balancing engine which work groups perform critical work and which do not:

-2 – Not a priority-1 – Low priority0 – Neutral priority1 – High priority2 – Essential priority

For example, you can indicate that work groups tasked with customer-facing, business-related work need robots more than work groups performing maintenance and back-office work.

When the number of assigned robots in a higher priority work group (1 or 2) is insufficient for the timely completion of assignments and no stand-by robots are available, the Auto-balancing engine reassigns robots that are currently working in lower priority work groups (-2, -1, or 0) to complete the critical work first.

The Auto-balancing engine does not reassign a working robot immediately, but waits until it completes its current assignment. Then, the robot is stopped and moved to the higher priority work group, where it is started.

Turning on automatic workload balancing in your application

Dynamically shift your robotic workforce to the busiest work groups by turning on Auto-balancing in your application. Auto-balancing facilitates reducing the number of pending assignments and ensures maximum robot efficiency.

Before you begin: Ensure that your operator account is associated with the Administrator or Robot Admin user roles. For more information, see Access roles for Pega Robot Manager users.
  1. From the Pega Robot Manager menu bar, select Settings.
  2. Click the Auto-balancing tab.
  3. Optional: To ensure that you are viewing the most current Auto-balancing settings, in the top-right corner of the application screen, click the More icon and then select Refresh.
    Other robot administrators might modify the Auto-balancing configuration during concurrent sessions.
  4. Enable the Turn on Auto-balancing switch.
  5. Confirm your settings by clicking Submit.
Result: You enabled Auto-balancing in the current application. You can now view the following current settings, including work group priority, as shown in the figure below:
Turning on Auto-balancing in the current application
Turning on Auto-balancing in the current application
What to do next: Enable robotic work groups for Auto-balancing.

Enabling robotic work groups for Auto-balancing

Determine the work groups in which Pega Robot Manager can increase or decrease the number of assigned robots, based on the current workload and the SLA deadline of open assignments. Adjust work group priority to ensure that Pega Robot Manager reassigns robots to complete the most important assignments first.

  1. From the Pega Robot Manager menu bar, select Settings.
  2. Click the Auto-balancing tab.
  3. Optional: To ensure that you are viewing the most current Auto-balancing settings, in the top-right corner of the application screen, click the More icon, and then select Refresh.
    Other robot administrators might modify the Auto-balancing configuration during concurrent sessions.
  4. Click Edit to configure the automatic workload balancing settings for each work group.
  5. Determine which work groups to enable for automatic workload balancing:
    • To enable Auto-balancing for all work groups in the current application, select the Work group check box.
    • To disable Auto-balancing for all work groups in the current application, clear the Work group check box.
    • To enable Auto-balancing for a specific work group, select the check box next to the work group name.
    • To disable Auto-balancing for a specific work group, clear the check box next to the work group name.
    Note:
    • You can enable or disable Auto-balancing only for work groups in the current application.
    • If you disable automatic workload balancing, Pega Robot Manager cannot automatically add robots to a work group to respond to a spike in open assignments or reassign idle robots to work in other work groups.
  6. Adjust the order of priority for work groups in which you enabled Auto-balancing by adjusting the SLA priority slider, as shown in the following example:

    Including robotic work groups in Auto-balancing
    Enabling robotic work groups for Auto-balancing
    Note: By setting different priority values you coordinate robot allocation and ensure that Pega Robot Manager dispatches robots to complete the most important assignments first. Based on your settings, the auto-balancing engine can force robots currently working on low-priority assignments to move to other work groups in response to a surge in more important work.
  7. Confirm your settings by clicking Save.
What to do next: Adjust the service-level agreement deadlines of your robotic assignments to your business needs so that Pega Robot Manager can better prioritize work groups when dispatching robots. For more information, see Managing service-level agreement of robotic assignments.
  • Previous topic Auto-balancing robot workload across work groups
  • Next topic Managing service-level agreement of robotic assignments

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