Adjust the auto-balancing evaluation interval carefully

Increasing or decreasing the auto-balancing interval might affect your robotic workforce in different ways.

The optimal value of the look-ahead period (three times the auto-balancing interval value) must correspond to the service level agreement (SLA) of your assignments. This means that the SLA of your assignments should match, or be slightly less than, your look-ahead period.

By decreasing the interval too much, you might unnecessarily increase the number of move, start, or stop operations because the auto-balancing engine might not have enough time to respond to changes in workload.

By increasing the interval too much, the assignments with short service-level agreement deadlines might cause too much chaotic movement (churn) in the system.

Consider scheduling robots when using tight SLA deadlines

To prevent robots from moving between work groups too often, do not configure the Auto-balancing evaluation interval to be less than 30 minutes. If the interval of 30 minutes is multiplied by three, then this value (90 minutes) matches the minimum recommended SLA (1.5 hours). If you need to configure the SLA in a work group to less than the minimum recommended value then, in addition to auto-balancing, consider scheduling robots to work within the work group. This way you ensure that the work group has robots available to complete any open assignments at all times.

Consider that the auto-balancing engine might ignore the work outside the time period for workload evaluation

Consider an example of a work group that has no robots assigned and has some queued open assignments whose SLA expires in four hours. In this example, the look-ahead period is three hours. In this configuration, the auto-balancing engine will move a robot to this work group, but this move will take place one hour too late.