Introduction to Schedules

Schedules are a collection of named events that are linked to the instance of a resource. As an example, a light or group of lights can have a schedule assigned to it (them). A schedule can be a single event or set of events. Events are schedule items and can occur periodically. Schedules are collections of events, which can also be defined to reoccur.

Schedules are linked to a set of tags via valuesets. When a scheduled event begins it reads the current value of the tag, and if necessary writes a new value to it. Depending upon the asset being controlled, valuesets can be a variety of datatypes: booleans, integers, and so forth. Since a schedule can define a set of events, you have fine control over the resource you have scheduled. That is, you can have lights turn on at the beginning of a schedule in the morning, dim during the middle of the day, turn up at dusk, and return to low light conditions when evening turns to night. You could also have the level of the light react to a sensor that measures the light that enters through your skylights and adjusts the lighting appropriately.

You can define holidays that are observed in your country or by your organization. Schedules that are assigned to those holidays override regular weekly schedules you created that would run on that day. However, you can create schedules that are exceptions, and exceptions are imposed in place of any other schedule.

When two or more schedules have events that overlap, a conflict exists. The Schedules provider in the Workbench allows you to set priorities for each event in a schedule and uses these priorities to determine which schedule's event applies at the time of conflict. A monitor view allows you to see which events are currently in force. The monitor view also allows you to manually override a scheduled event. This can be a temporary override, which expires after a given amount of time, or it can be manually cleared.