Defines the slots that should be used for an Appointment Template.
The Scheduling Window
A common business scenario is for appointments
to be booked at any time in the next three months, say, but also there is a
requirement for the schedule for the next 2 days (containing accepted appointments,
and maybe other types of work as well) to be fully optimised. The DSE and the
ABE need to be thinking about the same time period, and in the example above
this period is 3 months. However, the DSE does not need to be optimising the
whole 3 months of activities - to do so would slow it down considerably. It
merely needs to optimise the next 2 days, and be aware of the accepted appointments
for the next three months. The way to specify this is to specify in the Input_Reference
record a "duration" of 2 days (for full optimisation by the DSE) and
an "appointment_window_duration" of 89 days, representing the remaining
period in which appointment booking will occur. Note that this gives a total
period of 91 days, which is approximately three months. The ABE may offer appointments
during any of the period, i.e. in the example above, appointments can be offered
on any of the 91 days.
This may result in adding more constraints than you would typically need
None.
As a result of this activity, the Appointment Templates Items are defined.